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AP 




AN INTRODUCTION 


TO 

ENGLISH LITERATURE 


BY 

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN 

A.M., LL.D., J.U.D. 

PROFESSOR IN THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA 


BOSTON 

MARLIER AND COMPANY, Ltd. 
1901 



6 


THE LIBRARY OF 
0GNGRESS, 

Two Cof-.ta Received 

NOV. 6 1901 

COPVHKIHT ENTRV 

YLtya.l- iqoi 

CLASS QU *X<x No * 

2 D U'*) ± 
copy a 



Copyright, 1901 

By Marlier and Company, Ltd. 


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This book is intended, not so much to give facts 
as to develop a taste for the best, ethically and 
aesthetically, in English Literature. There are 
certain intentional repetitions, necessary, I think, 
from the higher pedagogical-point of view. The 
chapters on Shakspere, the Augustan Age, and 
Tennyson, should be read carefully, rather than 
studied in the usual way. The dates are arranged 
with the conscious purpose of making the learner 
independent of their mere place on the printed 
page. 

To Elmer Murphy, Litt. B. (Notre Dame), Ph.M. 
(Catholic University of America), I am indebted 
for valuable assistance, which assistance will be 
continued in the preparation of the succeeding 
volume, “ An Introduction to American Literature 
in English.” 






































CONTENTS 


CHAPTER I 

Early Saxon Writings. — Poems brought to England 
from the Homes of the Saxons, 460, — Caedmon, 
670 . 


CHAPTER II 

Before 600.—Early English Poems. — The Venerable 
Bede, 673. — The Reign of Eadgar, 958-75. — The 
Battle of Hastings, 1066 . 

CHAPTER II ( continued ) 

The Gallo-Norman Romances. — Geoffrey of Monmouth 
and the Celtic Element. —Layamon’s Brut, 1205.— 
The Ormulum, 1215. —Sir John Maundeville, 1356. 
— William Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, 
1362. —John Wyclif, 1380. —John Gower, 1393 . 

CHAPTER IH 

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 to 1400).—Lord Tennyson’s 
lines on Chaucer. — French Period: Romaunt of the 
Rose (attributed to Chaucer). — The Compleynte 
unto Pite (1372). — The Book of the Duchesse 
(1369). —Italian Period (1373 to 1384). — Troilus 




CONTENTS 


viii 


and Criseyde. — The Compleynt of Mars. — Ane- 
lida and Arcite. —Boethius. — The Former Age. — 
The Parlement of Foules. — Chaucer’s Wordes un¬ 
to Adam.—The Pious of Fame. — English Period 
(1381 to 1389). —The Legend of Good Women.— 
The Canterbury Tales. — Occleve’s Gouvernail of 
Princes (1411 or 1412). — John Lydgate (about 
1433). — The Scotch Poets. 

CHAPTER IV 

Early English Prose. 

CHAPTER Y 

Spenser. 

CHAPTER VI 

Prose —1561-1731 . 


CHAPTER VII 

Spenser to Shakspere, 1553-1593. The Beginning of 
the Drama. — Marlowe. 

CHAPTER VIII 

Shakspere. 

CHAPTER IX 

Minor Dramatists and Ben Jonson. The Lyrists. — 
1596-1654 . 


Page 

25 

41 

50 

58 

67 

75 

96 


CHAPTER X 

Milton and Dryden. From 1608 to 1700 


110 










CONTENTS 


IX 


CHAPTER XI 

The Augustan Age. — Alexander Pope and his Time. — 
The beginning of Modern English History. — 1688- 
1744 . 


CHAPTER XII 

The Augustan Age. — Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson 
CHAPTER XIII 

The Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. —Robert Burns, 
Wordsworth, Mangan, Aubrey De Vere .... 

CHAPTER XIV 

Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. — Lord Tennyson . 
CHAPTER XV 

The Religious Poets. — The Pre-Raphaelites. — The 
Lighter Poets. — Sir Edwin Arnold, Lewis Morris, 
and Others. 


CHAPTER XVI 

Modern Prose. — Burke. — Ruskin. — Carlyle. — Ma¬ 
caulay. — De Quincey. — Newman ...... 

CHAPTER XVII 

The Novel as a Form of Literary Expression. — The 
Novels of Shakspere’s Time. — Richardson to 
Father Sheehan. (1740 to 1901). 


Page 

120 

142 

165 

184 

207 

220 

231 















































































ENGLISH LITERATURE 


CHAPTER I 

Early Saxon Writings. — Poems Brought to England 
from the Homes of the Saxons, 460 . — 
Caedmon , 670 . 

1. Literature is a verbal reflection of life. It is 
the only means by which we know how mankind 
in other times lived, thought, and acted. English 
literature includes all literature written in the Eng¬ 
lish language. 

In speaking of American literature, we must re¬ 
member that it means many writings not in Eng¬ 
lish. In South America and Mexico there are 
great authors who do not write the English lan¬ 
guage ; and in Canada, which is part of America, 
there are numbers of writers of the French lan¬ 
guage deservedly celebrated. 

2. Before the Invention of the art of writing, or 
when only a few wrote, literature was perpetuated 
by tradition; it was handed down from father to 
son. Then the memory of man was his library. 
It is said that the works of Homer were pre- 

l 


2 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


served in this manner among the Greeks for five 
hundred years. Later, symbolical characters, or 
letters, were impressed on various substances, such 
as the bark of trees and prepared leaves. About 
the year 1471, books began to be printed in Eng¬ 
land, and the monks, who had laboriously preserved 
great masterpieces of literature by writing and 
illuminating them with wonderful care and taste, 
now learned to print by the aid of carved blocks 
and hand-presses. Many of the terms now in use 
among printers may be traced to the printing- 
offices of the Benedictine monks, who eagerly 
made use of the new art. To the care of the 
monks we owe not only the preservation of the 
Bible, but of the Greek and Latin classics. 

3. Verse was the earliest form of literature in 
all languages. The Old English poetry was not 
in rhyme as we understand it. Alliteration and 
accents were essential. There are generally four 
accents in a line; but sometimes there are more 
accented syllables, and sometimes more than three 
alliterations. This is the usual form of the 
alliteration: 

“ Soft is the Silence of Silvery twilight.’ * 

Two alliterations are in the first part of the line, 
and one in the second. Compound words are 
common — whale's-path and swan-road for the sea, 
wave-horse for a ship, war-adder for an arrow, and 


EARLY SAXON WRITINGS 


3 


gold-friend of men for king occur very often. The 
rules by which the oldest English poems are written 
allowed of the repetition of the same thought or fact 
several times. This is very common in the Hebrew; 
for instance: 

“ He shall make the deep sea to boil like a pot, and 
shall make it as when ointments boil.” —Job xli. 32 . 

and 

“ I will speak and take breath a little : I will open my 
lips,and will answer.” —Job xxxii. 20. 

4. The Language in which the earliest English 
poems were spoken or sung differs much from the 
English of to-day. It was brought from Jutland, 
or Saxony, by the tribes who landed in Britain 
and drove the Britons, whom they called Welsh, into 
Wales and Cornwall, and into the part of France 
called Brittany. The latter preserve a separate lan¬ 
guage and literature to this day. Later, the stories 
of the Britons crept into English literature. The 
Tales of King Arthur , on which Tennyson founded 
his great epic, was British, not Saxon. The Britons 
left us some Celtic words, of domestic import or the 
names of places: avon and ex (meaning water), 
cradle, mojo, pillow, mattock , crock, kiln, and a few 
others. Saxons probably married British wives, and 
hence we have the domestic British terms; but the 
majority of the Britons fled, leaving the land to the 
Saxon conqueror and his language. 


4 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


5. The First English Poems and the Epic “ Beowulf ” 

were doubtless composed long before the seventh 
century, and taken from the continent to England 
in the memory of Saxon bards. Beowulf was 
reduced to writing in the eighth century by a monk 
of Northumbria. The Song of the Tra veller, the 
earliest poem, enumerates the singer’s experiences 
with the Goths. Deor's Complaint is a sad story of 
one who is made a beggar by war; it speaks of 
dumb submission to the gods. The Fight at Finns - 
burg and Waldhere are, with Beowulf, all the poems 
or parts of poems brought to England from the homes 
of the Saxons. These fragments and the epic of 
Beowulf may be studied with the help of an Anglo- 
Saxon grammar. Beowulf is the story of a ferocious 
monster called Grendel. It was sung in parts by the 
warriors at their feasts, each chanting a part. This 
monster Grendel, like the dragons of the fairy-tales, 
had the habit of eating human flesh. He harassed 
Hrothgar, thane of Jutland, appearing in the ban¬ 
quet-hall and devouring any guest that suited his 
fancy. Beowulf of Sweden sails to Jutland to assist 
the unfortunate king, and succeeds in killing the 
monster. Beowulf, however, no more shows the 
worst spirit of the Saxon pagan than Sir Edwin 
Arnold’s poem, The Light of Asia, shows the selfish¬ 
ness of Buddhism. The Northumbrian Christian who 
transcribed it in 3184 alliterative lines put the mark 
of his finer and gentler thoughts upon it. To under- 


EARLY SAXON WRITINGS 


5 


stand something of the spirit of the Teutonic tribes 
that began to make England, one might read Long¬ 
fellow’s Skeleton in Armor , and The Invasion by 
Gerald Griffin, and Ivanhoe , by Sir Walter Scott. In 
the last occurs the famous dialogue between Gurth 
and Wamba on the growth of the Norman, or cor¬ 
rupt Latin, element in the English language. 

6. About the year 670, the first entirely English 
poem was written by Caedmon. It is a poetical 
paraphrase of the Old and the New Testaments. It 
was written in Yorkshire, on a wind-swept cliff, in 
the abbey presided over by St. Hilda, a religious of 
noble blood. Caedmon was an elderly servant of the 
abbey, and when, after the feast, he was called on to 
sing in his turn, over his cup of mead, with the 
other servants, he refused because he had heard no 
songs that were not of cruelty and in praise of evil 
passions. One night he crept away from the table, 
sad because the others jeered at him, and went to 
sleep in the cow-shed; and a voice in his dream 
said to him, “ Sing me a song ! ” Caedmon answered 
that he could not sing; for that reason he had left 
the feast. “ You must sing S ” said the voice ; “ sing 
the beginning of created things.” Caedmon sang 
some lines in his sleep about God and the creation. 
He remembered these lines when he awoke. The 
Abbess Hilda, believing that his gift must come from 
God, had him taught sacred history, and he became 
a monk. Caedmon’s paraphrases are full of the poet’s 


6 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


individuality. His description of the unholy tri¬ 
umph of Satan when he succeeds in tempting Eve is 
as striking as any passage in Milton’s poem, Para¬ 
dise Lost, on the same subject. Caedmon’s simplicity, 
naturalness, and deep religious feeling cause this 
ancient poem to he read and quoted by scholars 
to-day. It is said that the author died in 680, — a 
date which is also given as that of the death of St. 
Hilda, his friend and patroness. Caedmon gave the 
English a taste for the Old and the New Testa¬ 
ments. Caedmon’s poems suggested to Milton the 
great epic, Paradise Lost} 


1 See Brother Azarius’ Development of Old English Thought. 


CHAPTER II 


Before 600. — Early English Poems. — The Venerable 
Bede , 673. — The Reign of Eadgar, 958-75. — 
The Battle of Hastings, 1066. 

7. Judith, a paraphrase of the Scripture story, is 
the next important poem after Beowulf. Mr. Sweet, 
a great authority on Old English, or Anglo-Saxon 
poetry, says that this poet surpasses both Caedmon 
and Cynewulf in constructive skill and in command 
of his foreign subject, and that he is not inferior 
to them “ in command of language and metre.” The 
author of Judith and the date of its composition are 
unknown. Only about a quarter of the poem has 
been preserved. The three cantos, however, are 
very effective. The author throws himself into the 
spirit of the conflict between the Hebrews and the 
Assyrians. Judith has none of the sympathetic 
touches which make Beowulf seem closer to hu¬ 
manity; it is a poem of blood and war. The de¬ 
scriptions of the banquet of Holofernes, of the fear 
of the Assyrian courtiers who do not dare to wake 
their king, and of the return of Judith triumphant, 
are grandly done. The picture of the battle between 
the Hebrews and the Assyrians is very graphic : 


8 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ Linden-shields curved, that a little before 
Had suffered the scoff and the scorn of the stranger, 

The hiss of the heathen; hard was the guerdon 
Paid the Assyrians with play of the ash-spears, 

After the host of the Hebrew people, 

Gonfalon-guided, onward had gone 
Against the camp. Then they with courage 
Sharply let fly the showers of shafts, 

Battle-adders from bows of horn. 

Stoutest of arrows; loudly they stormed, 

The warriors wrathful, winging their spears 
At the horde of the hardy; the heroes were ireful, 

The dwellers in land, ’gainst the direful race; 

Marched the stern-souled ones, the stout of heart 
Fiercely o’erwhelmed their long-standing foernen, 

Drowsy with mead; then drew they with hand 
Forth from their sheaths their finely-decked swords, 
Trusty of edge; tirelessly slew they 
The Assyrian chosen, champions all, 

Nerved with malice; none did they spare 
Among the myrmidons, mean nor mighty, 

Of living men whom they might master.” 

8. Judith, as you see, was composed by a Chris¬ 
tian familiar with the Sacred Scriptures. It seems 
strange that men familiar with early English litera¬ 
ture should insist that the Bible was little known in 
England until about the time of Henry VIII. The 
best analysis and translation of Judith is that made 
by Professor Albert S. Cook. 

9. On the Death of Csedmon, Aldhelm, afterwards 
Abbot of Malmesbury, took his place. He made and 
sang his own songs, which he delighted in chanting 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


9 


to the common people; they were Scriptural moni¬ 
tions put into a popular form and were well known 
in the good King Alfred’s reign. 

10. The Poems of Cynewulf are the sweetest of all 
those written in Northumbria. The remnants of 
early English poetry are found in the “ Exeter 
Book ” and the “ Vercelli Book,” the names of which 
are taken from the places where their manuscripts 
are at present. Cynewulf is credited with some of 
the pieces contained in these books. They are gener¬ 
ally religious. They were preserved in writing by 
the monks, who preferred them to secular songs 
treating of war and revenge. Death is represented 
as terrible; but there is always a gleam of divine 
hope shining through the cloud. Among Cynewulf’s 
works are : Elene, or The Finding of the True Cross, 
St. Andreas, The Phoenix, The Passion of St. Juli¬ 
ana, Guthlac , and many hymns in honor of our 
Lord. 

11. The Song of Brunanburh (937) and the Song 
of the Fight at Maldon (931 ?) are two war-songs 
which have been preserved. The first was written 
for the Saxon Chronicle, which is a record of his¬ 
torical events from the reign of iElfred to that 
of Stephen; the story of Cynewulf and Cyne- 
heard in it dates back as far as 775. About a 
century later King Alfred began the editing of it, 
and, instead of a slight record of events, it be¬ 
came a history. The Song of Brunanburh was 


10 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


inserted to describe a great battle between the 
Saxons under iEthelstan and the Scots and North¬ 
men. It ends with a dark glimpse of the deserted 
battle-field: 

“ Silenced by swords and slain were the Danskers; 

Gone were the others, gone in the night-gloom ; 

Shrill shrieked the screamers of death o’er the dying, — 
The raven, the eagle, the wolf of the wild wood, 

The vulture, — to feast on the white flesh of men.” 

The Fight at Maldon is the story of how Byrht- 
noth and his men bravely meet death, trusting 
in God, against the Danes. A victory of King 
Eadmund, 1016, and the coronation of King Eadgar, 
973, are among the later poems in the Chronicle. 

12. The Venerable Bede was born in the year of 
our Lord 673. Baeda, as his name is often written, 
was not only the father of English prose, but the 
scholar to whom England owes the beginning of 
scholarship. Bseda was a devout monk; he lived a 
tranquil life at Jarrow, given up entirely to the 
work of enlightening the world by letters. It is 
the fashion to elevate Wyclif and Tyndale and 
other paraphrasers of the Scriptures who came after 
Bseda to the highest place, for the reason that they 
revolted against the Church on whose authority the 
world received the Bible. But to Bseda’s reverent 
and scholarly mind is due the first prose translation 
of the Gospel of St. John into English. This was 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


11 


his last work. He finished it on his death-bed. His 
forty-five other works were in Latin. All that 
Englishmen for many years knew of the sciences, 
they owed to him. Through this gentle monk, 
who was thoroughly permeated with love for the 
authority of the Catholic Church, England made 
her earliest step in learning. Just as the scribe 
had written the last words of his translation he 
began the Gloria in Excel sis, and died singing 
it. 

Baeda established learning in the North. The 
monasteries had become the homes of scholars; 
libraries were established by ecclesiastics. Six 
hundred students, at least, had sat at Baeda’s feet 
and prepared themselves to spread his teaching 
through the land. Alcuin, another great scholar, 
left his impress on the English mind. Baeda, like 
Caedmon, was born in Northumbria, which had been 
the home of learning. But the Danish invasions 
crushed out scholarship. The south of England was 
illiterate when Alfred came to the throne. The 
thanes of Wessex thought only of warlike exercises 
and athletic sports. Alfred, thanks to his mother, 
had been imbued with a love of letters. 

13. Saxon Literature contained no books of 
science, for those of Baeda were in Latin. iElfred 
regretted this. He sent to foreign countries for 
such men as Grimbald of St. Omer’s, and Asser 
of St. David’s. Under their tuition, he began to 


12 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


study Latin literature. He opened schools wherever 
it was possible. Lingard says, “ It was his will 
that the children of every freeman, whose circum¬ 
stances would allow it, should acquire the elemen¬ 
tary arts of reading and writing; and that those 
who were designed for civic or ecclesiastical em¬ 
ployment should moreover he instructed in Latin.” 
iElfred translated for his subjects the ecclesiastical 
history of the English by Bteda and the abridgment 
of ancient history by Orosius, the Consolation of 
Philosophy by Boethius, and, for the clergy, the 
Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great. 

14. St. Dunstan and Aethelwold, two good ecclesias¬ 
tics, are the next great names in Saxon literature. 
The invading Danes destroyed the monasteries, and 
there was little effort to cultivate literature until 
the peaceful reign of Eadgar (958-75). The incur¬ 
sions of the Danes had caused ecclesiastical disci¬ 
pline to relax. Some priests had even married. 
St. Dunstan appealed to Rome to restore good order 
and to encourage scholarship. The Abbot iElfric 
translated a great part of the Bible into simple 
English. He wrote his Homilies, the Lives of the 
Saints, and the first English-Latin dictionary. In the 
beginning of the eleventh century, the Archbishop* 
Wulfstan’s Address to the English appeared. It is 
as terrible a picture of the consequences of the 
Danish invasion as St. Anselm gives in his cele¬ 
brated poem in Latin, which contains the lovely 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


13 


hymn. Omni die , die Mctrice. Saxon literature re¬ 
vived for a while under Edward the Confessor, 
to become mingled in the Norman torrent that 
rushed into it a few years later at the battle of 
Hastings. 


CHAPTER II ( continued ) 


The Gallo-Norman Romances. — Geoffrey of Mon¬ 
mouth and the Celtic Element. — Layamon's Brut, 
1205.— The Ormulum,Yl\§. — Sir John Maun- 
deville y 1358. — William Langland's Vision of 
Piers Plowman , 1382 .—John Wyclif , 1380.— 
John Gower , 1393. 

15. Religion, one of the most important factors in 
the life of nations, has always inspired and influ¬ 
enced the expression of that life. We have seen 
that all the poets who wrote after the Saxons in 
England had become Christianized were stimulated 
by the great objects offered by Christianity to their 
contemplation. As England owes the first success¬ 
ful effort to blot out human slavery to a priest, 
Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, so to priests and 
monks is due the revival of letters in England 
after the confusion of the change of rulers. The 
battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror 
defeated Harold, meant a great deal. The Saxons, 
the Danes, and the Normans were originally of 
the same blood. The Danes who overran England 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 15 

mixed with the Saxons and did not change the 
speech. 

16. With William came warriors of the Scandi¬ 
navian race,— Northmen, — who, during a long 
residence in the part of France which their fore¬ 
fathers had conquered, had learned to speak the 
corrupt Latin known as the Gallo-Roman, because 
in Gaul it had degenerated from the sonorous Roman 
speech. This Gaulish Roman language is also known 
as Norman French, as these Normans spoke, and 
some of them wrote, it. 

There is a famous dialogue, in Walter Scott’s 
Ivanhoe , between Wamba the fool and Gurth the 
swineherd, in which is described the process by 
which the English speech was changed by the 
Norman invasion, — a process by which it became 
gradually more exact, more elegant, more compre¬ 
hensive, more plastic, without losing any of that 
directness, strength, and simplicity so characteristic 
of its Teutonic character. When the Conqueror 
entered England an epoch began which was to help 
greatly towards making the English language and 
literature the magnificent things they are. 

It is too common to think little of the influence 
of the Celts on English language and literature. But 
from the reign of Henry I., the third of the Norman 
kings, to the present time, the Celtic force has made 
itself felt in both the literature and the language of 
English-speaking peoples. This influence — of the 


16 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Welsh, the Irish, and the Scotch Celt — has been 
pointed out by a celebrated modern writer, Matthew 
Arnold. 

17. Geoffrey of Monmouth (1110-1154), was a 

Welsh priest at the Court of Henry I. He wrote 
a legendary history of Britain, in which King Arthur 
and his knights were given much to do, and the life 
of Brut, the first King of Wales and great-grandson 
of the pious iEneas. These Celtic stories were taken 
from the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth and put 
into the Gallo-Roman speech, the vernacular of the 
knights and ladies who then occupied the castles of 
England. They were sung and written by the min¬ 
strels in France, and brought back to England by 
the Norman poet, Wace, in the reign of Henry II. 
Tennyson’s great epic, The Idyls of the King , is 
founded on some of the Celtic tales told by Geoffrey 
of Monmouth. 

18. The English Language, little changed by the 
Conquest, continued to be the speech of the people, 
and Norman-French—from which the word Ro¬ 
mance is derived — the language of the upper classes. 
The priests used Latin; the nobles and foreign sol¬ 
diers, Norman-French. The art of story-telling was 
brought into fashion by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 
legends and the Norman minstrels. The two queens 
of Henry I., Matilda and Alice, encouraged the 
jingling rhymesters, who spun out the adventures of 
King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Alexander the Great 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


17 


at endless length. The Anglo-Saxon poetry, rugged 
as it was, was poetry. From the Gallo-Roman poems 
still existing in MS., we can only wonder how the 
ladies and knights managed to listen and applaud. 
They were lavish both in applause and more sub¬ 
stantial rewards. 

19. The English Chronicle, written in the speech 
of the people, is the only piece of native English 
literature we find rippling through the turgidity of 
letters in England. It is made up of the Annals 
of Worcester, Winchester, Peterborough, and Abing¬ 
don, carried on at different periods in these places. 
They were finally merged into a connected whole 
and carried up to 1131 by a single person. This 
chronicle was begun at least a hundred years before 
the reign of King iElfred (871), and continued until 
the accession of Henry II. The last event it records 
is the death of King Stephen. Let it be remarked 
that, until the reign of King John, the Normans and 
the English — or Saxons, as we may call them, from 
their origin — were distinct peoples living in one 
land. The Normans were the ruling race. They 
gave to the English speech its courtly terms, its 
names for the implements of battle, of the chase. 
But the Norman tongue was only the embroidery 
on a solid and beautiful texture. The Saxon was 
the hog, while the Norman was the stag, in the 
estimation of the nobles. English literature may 
be said to have slept until the reign of John, when, 


18 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


in 1205, Layamon’s version of the Brut, which was 
first told by Geoffrey of Monmonth, appeared. 

20. Layamon was a studious priest dwelling on 
the banks of the Severn. At this time both Saxons 
and Normans had begun to look on the early history 
of their common island with a certain pride. The 
Norman-French had gradually ceased to be the 
tongue of the entire upper classes. And when 
Layamon resolved to translate the Brut into English, 
he felt that he was about to do a noble work for his 
people. He used as the basis for his poem, the 
French version of Wace; but made it so entirely 
English that there were few French words in his 
text. He adopted the head-rhyme of the Saxon. 
In Layamon’s energetic verses we see a great con¬ 
trast to the meaningless jingles of the Gallo-Norman 
poets. If the Normans gave the English language 
symmetry, the Saxons gave it strength. Layamon’s 
Brut is the first evidence of the complete mingling 
of the Norman and Saxon elements in English 
speech. It has the vigor of Csedmon and Cynewulf. 
The appearance of Layamon marks a new epoch. 

21. The Ormulum (1215) is a prayer-book in verse, 
with a meditation, or little sermon, for every day in 
the week. Only a part of it remains. It was writ¬ 
ten by a priest named Orm. It was inspired by the 
motive which has made Thomas a Kempis’ Following 
of Christ a classic. The Ormulum is in English. 
The other early religious books were many in number. 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


19 


Among them were The Rule of the Anchoresses (1220), 
The Genesis and Exodus (1250), many hymns to the 
Blessed Virgin, and a volume of metrical Lives of the 
Saints, translated from Latin into French. 

22. The Franciscan and Dominican Friars helped to 
make the Normans and Saxons one people by unit¬ 
ing them in the bonds of a common faith. The 
Normans and Saxons both acknowledged the author¬ 
ity of the Pope, however their national prejudices 
might clash. The friars influenced the speech of the 
people. St. Anselm and the great churchmen who 
immediately preceded and succeeded him wrote in 
Latin. The friars learned English for the purpose of 
communicating with- the people, and they led well- 
intentioned men to make English books. In 1303 
Robert Mannyng translated into English the Man¬ 
ual of Sins ; in 1327 William of Shoreham trans¬ 
lated the Psalms. About 1327, appeared the Cursor 
Mundi , a metrical version of the New Testament in 
English, with legends of the saints; in 1340 ap¬ 
peared the Ayenbite of Inwyt, — the early English 
equivalent for remorse of conscience, — and about 
the same time, Richard Rolle’s Prick of Conscience. 

23. Annals.— The Chronicles begin with William 
of Malmesbury (1126) and end with Matthew Paris 
(1273). These in some measure superseded the his¬ 
torical narrative continued in the old English Chron¬ 
icle. They were written at court in LatM; the 
annals were written in monasteries. 


20 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


24. Romances.— The Arthurian Legends, first writ¬ 
ten for the Normans in England by Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, were re-arranged by Walter Map, in 
the reign of Henry II. In his version The Holy 
Grail makes its appearance. Another romantic se¬ 
ries of stories were those of Charlemagne and His 
Twelve Knights, Alexander the Great, The Siege of 
Troy. These romantic legends entered into the 
blood of English poetry. We meet with them very 
often later hi many forms. The Seven Champions of 
Christendom, including Guy of Warwick and Beves 
of Hamtoun, and many other tales taken from the 
French, became popular. Towards the end of the 
fifteenth century the English story-tellers borrowed 
their plots rather from Italy than from France. 
Richard Coeur de Lion and Robin Hood were heroes 
of romantic legends. 

25. English Ballads clustered around the name of 
the outlaw Robin Hood. Towards the end of the 
fourteenth century, lyrics and short English poems 
sprung up. The most important is The Kitchen 
Lord and Laurence Minot’s (1333-1352) war ballads. 

26. The Vision of Piers Plowman.— A bitter and 
despondent poem, in which we find an echo of the 
sadness of Beowulf, is William Langland’s Vision of 
Piers Plowman. Langland was born in Shropshire, 
England, about 1330. He had reason for sadness; 
plagu^and tempest had swept over England, and al¬ 
most decimated the inhabitants of the land. In the 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


21 


person of Piers he inveighs against the oppression of 
the poor and the abuses which had, owing to Eng¬ 
land’s distance from Rome and the haughtiness of 
the Norman nobles, entered the religious and social 
fabric. In the Vision the Church tells of Truth. 
Piers seeks for this Truth, which means in the first 
part justice among both priests and laymen. Truth 
afterwards becomes God the Father, and Piers our 
Lord Himself. It lashes mercilessly the abuses of 
the times, and shows how a love for material things 
and a neglect of charity toward the poor make the 
laborer despair of justice. It appeared in 1352. 
It was probably written at Oxford, where Langland 
was a secular priest. In 1377 and 1393 the poem, 
with additions, called Do Wei, Do Bet , and Do Best 
appeared. Another poem on The Deposition of Rick¬ 
ard II. was written late in life. It is said that he 
died in the year of Chaucer’s death, 1400. 

27. John Wyclif (1320-1384) had the merit of 
writing in good English for his time. His name has 
been used as that of a pioneer of the movement 
to which Henry VIII. gave form — the rebellion 
against the authority of the Catholic Church. He 
has been unreasonably called “ the morning-star of 
the Reformation.” Wyclif is first mentioned in his¬ 
tory about the year 1367. He was about this time 
deprived of a wardenship he held at Oxford, on the 
charge that he had illegally gained it. A short time 
before he had made an attack on the mendicant fri- 


22 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


ars, who had done so much towards the conversion 
of England. It was unchristian to ask for alms, he 
held, and when they appealed .to the example of Our 
Lord, he returned that Our Lord had not asked for 
alms. He held, too, that the right to hold property 
is a grace of God, and that men forfeited it by sin. 
This doctrine had a great deal to do with the bloody 
rebellion of the peasants which followed. He 
changed the text of the Scriptures, and scattered it 
over the land by means of the “ poor priests,” his fol¬ 
lowers. He appealed from the decision of the 
Bishops to the private judgment of individuals, and 
urged them to interpret the Scriptures for themselves. 
Versions of the Scriptures had been made before 
Wyclif’s, but they had not been so widely spread, 
nor were they written in such strong English, nor 
were they sent forth with the advice that unlearned 
men should interpret them. When he appealed in 
doctrinal matters from his Bishop to a lay tribunal, 
his supporters fell away from him. He finally re¬ 
tracted all the doctrines which were contrary to the 
teaching of the Church ; he was permitted to retire 
to Lutterworth, where he continued to be rector. 
A stroke of apoplexy rendered him speechless, and 
he died on the last day of the year, 1384, while as¬ 
sisting at Mass. It may be noted that while Wyclif 
spared no words of abuse against the Bishops and 
the clergy, no attempt was made to persecute him. 
Considering the dangerous doctrines he publicly 


EARLY ENGLISH POEMS 


23 


taught, we may cite this as an evidence of modera¬ 
tion in the reign of Richard II. 

28. Sir John Maundeville, who is sometimes looked 
upon as a fictitious personage, is said to have been 
born at Albans about the year 1300. Whether or not 
he ever lived, or his name was merely a nom de 
plume , we know that the narrative of his travels was 
borrowed largely from many books of the same kind 
then in existence, and that he had never seen most 
of the countries he pretends to have visited. The 
whole title of the book is The Voiage and Travaile 
of Sir John Maundeville, Knight. It was written in 
French and became so popular that it was translated 
into several languages. The only manuscript copy 
we have is in French, the English versions being 
translations so much at fault that we know they 
could not have been the work of the author himself. 

29. John Gower (1325-1408), surnamed the 
“moral Gower” by his friend Chaucer, wrote the 
Speculum Meditaniis (The Mind of The Thoughtful 
Man), in French; the Vox Clam antis (The Voice of 
One Crying ), in Latin; and Confessio Amantis (The 
Lover's Confession), in English. The last was 
written at the request of King Richard. Gower 
was under the influence of French literature. He 
was at his best in rebuking the follies of the king, 
who respected him. The Speculum Meditantis was 
discovered only a few years ago at Cambridge. His 
poems are very dull and long. 


24 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


We are now in the Middle period of the English 
Language. It lasted from the time of Chaucer to 
the middle of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. During this 
time all things without life were put in the neuter 
gender, and some Teutonic practices, such as the 
termination of the infinitive with en, began to be 
dropped. 


CHAPTER III 


Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 to 1400 ). — Lord Tennyson's 
lines on Chaucer. — French Period: Romaunt of 
the Rose (attributed to Chaucer). — The Compleynte 
unto Pite ( 1372 ). — The Booh of the Duchesse 
( 1369 ). — Italian Period (1373 to 1384 ). — Troilus 
and Criseyde. — The Compleynt of Mars .— Ane- 
lida and Arcite. — Boethius .— The Former Age 
— The Parlement of Foules. — Chaucer's Wordes 
unto Adam. — The Hous of Fame. — English 
Period (1381 to 1389 ). — The Legend of Good 
Women. — The Canterbury Tales. — Occleve's Gou- 
vernail of Princes (1411 or 1412 ). — John Lydgate 
(about 1433 ). — The Scotch Poets. 

30. Geoffrey Chaucer is the first truly great poet 
who wrote in English, the poetic precursor of 
Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, 
Tennyson, Aubrey de Yere, Bryant, Longfellow, 
and Whittier. All later poets have praised him. 
Tennyson, in “ The Dream of Fair Women,” says 
melodiously: 

“I read, before my eyelids dropt their shade, 

* The Legend of Good Women,’ long ago 
Sung by the morning star of song, who made 
His music heard below ; 


26 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath 
Preluded those melodious bursts that fill 
The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
With sounds that echo still.” 

“Dan” is a prefix of respect, resembling “Dom,” and 
though we might object to Elizabeth’s being called 
“ good,” we can find no fault with the adjective 
“ great,” for she was more kingly than queenly. 

31. The City of London was Geoffrey Chaucer’s 
birth-place. His father was probably a wine mer¬ 
chant ; he was born about 1340. Early in life he 
was made page to Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence; 
he fought in France with the English army; he was 
taken prisoner, and ransomed. From 1381 to 1386, 
he was again connected with the court. His earliest 
poems were lost or only fragmentarily preserved. 
The earliest complete poem of his we still possess is 
the A. B. C. of the Blessed Virgin. Each stanza 
begins with a letter of the alphabet. “ G ” begins, 
(the spelling is modernized 1 ), with these four lines: 

“ Glorious maid and mother, thou that never 
Wert bitter on the earth or on the sea, 

But full of sweetness and of mercy ever, 

Help that my Father be not wroth with me ! ” 

This was translated from the French for the 
Duchess Blanche, the wife of John of Gaunt, 

1 In reading Chaucer the e before a consonant ought to be 
pronounced, —for instance : “ neither in erthe nor in see.” 


GEOFFREY CHAUCER 


27 


Chaucer’s powerful friend. His early poems show 
a strong French influence. 

32. Chaucer’s Italian Period followed his three 
diplomatic missions to Italy. It is supposed that 
there he met Petrarca, the sweet master of the 
sonnet, and Boccaccio, whose stories very much in¬ 
fluenced the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer quotes 
often from Dante, hut he could not have met him, 
as Durante Alighieri (called Dante) died in 1321. 
The works of Chaucer, after his Italian journeys, 
were serious in motive. 

33. The Canterbury Tales, a string of narrative 
poems on which Chaucer’s fame rests, and which 
entitle him to be called, in Spenser’s words, the 
“ well of English undefiled,” show that the poet had 
cast off the French and Italian influence and become 
English. It is true that he borrowed the plot of 
some of his stories from Boccaccio’s frivolous tales 
of the Florentine nobles who revelled while the 
plague raged in their city. The Canterbury Tales 
are genuine pictures of English folk. They give us 
an impression of Chaucer’s time, though, in reading 
them, one toust remember that Chaucer was a poet, 
not an historian. He is humorous and grave by 
turns, respectful of sacred things, though sometimes 
coarse. Dying, he bitterly regretted certain lines 
which even his contrite tears could not blot out. 
He was sometimes free in his expressions concern¬ 
ing abuses that may have crept into religious disci- 


28 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


pline. He was neither a schismatic nor a heretic. 
He was a devout Catholic, with none of the bitter¬ 
ness and pride which characterized his contemporary, 
Wyclif. His favorite flower was the daisy, and he 
loved the woods and fields as no poet before him 
had loved them; he made the love of natural scenery 
a quality in English poetry. 

34. Chaucer the Man was always cheerful. His 
portrait shows him to have been grave, yet with a 
humorous look. He is painted with his inkhorn 
and rosary. In spite of occasional indelicacies, the 
writings of Chaucer show that he was a deeply 
religious man. 

35. Chaucer the Poet was, above all, a teller of 
stories; although he translated De Consolatione 
Philosophies into English, he is not remembered by 
it or any of his other translations. Chaucer’s fame 
rests on his power of observing and feeling. Wil¬ 
liam Hazlitt 1 says of Chaucer that he had “an 
equal eye for truth of nature and discrimination of 
character; and his interest in what he saw gave 
new distinctness and force to his power of obser¬ 
vation.” In The Canterbury Tales , 'he paints 
his time as he saw it, with Charles Dickens’ ten¬ 
dency to make each individual’s character known by 
his external appearance. This is accountable for 
occasional exaggeration. 

He shows us a party of pilgrims on their way to 
1 Lectures on the English Poets. 


GEOFFREY CHAUCER 


29 


the shrine of St. Thomas, the martyred Archbishop 
of Canterbury. They stop “in Southwark, at the 
Tabard.” Among them is a knight, a worthy 
man,— 

“ That fro the time that he first bigan 
To ryden out, he loved chivalrye, 

Trouth and honour, fredom and curteisye.” 

His son, a young squire, — 

“ Curteys he was, lowly and servisable 
And 9 arf 1 biforn his fader at the table.” 

There, too, was a yeoman, who 

“ A sheef of pecock-arues 2 brighte and kene 
Under his belt he bar ful thriftily.” 

A nun, a Prioress, called Madame Eglantine, — 

“ At mete wel y-taught was she withalle, 

She leet no morsel from her lippes falle, 

Ne wette her fingres in her saucb deepe.” 

A priest who 

“ Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve 
He taughte, but first he folwed it himselve.” 

These personages and others, including the clerk 
of Oxford and the wife of Bath, each tell a story. 
Their stories are characteristic of the persons who 
recite them. The gentle and refined Prioress speaks 
of an heroic child who, dying for his Faith, 

“ 0 Alma Redemptoris Mater loudly sang.” 

1 Carved. 2 Arrows with peacock feathers. 


30 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


The clerk of Oxford, — a well-read man, borrows 
from the Italian *the tale of the patient Griselda, 
who suffers in loving silence persecution and abuse; 
and the good-natured wife of Bath tells a comic 
story. Dryden and Pope translated parts of The 
Canterbury Tales into more modern English. 
Chaucer began to make English the grand language 
it is; we owe him as great a debt as the Italians 
owe Dante. None of the poets before him wrote 
musical verse. He was a scholar, and yet much in 
the busy world; he knew men, and he believed that 
“ the proper study of mankind is man.” He loved na¬ 
ture ; the May-time, the daisy, green leaves, and birds 
make his poetry fresh with the joyousness of spring. 

One of his later works was a prose treatise on the 
Astrolabe, made for “little Lewis, his son.” Parts 
of The Canterbury Tales were written in the last 
ten years of his life. The Parson’s tale was written 
in 1400, when he died in London. He was the first 
poet buried in Westminister Abbey. 

36. Thomas Occleve, or Hoccleve, was bom about 
1370. His principal poem is The Gouvernail of 
Princes, for the most part a translation from the 
Latin of the Roman iEgidius, a pupil of St. Thomas 
Aquinas. The poem is in rhyme royal, which con¬ 
sists of seven heroic lines. Occleve, in this poem, 
addresses Chaucer, — 

“ O maister dere and fader reverent, 

My maister Chaucer, floure of eloquence.” 


JAMES I. 


31 


He is very reverent in spirit. The date of his 
death is unknown. 

37. John Lydgate, born in Suffolk about 1370. 
His poems are The Storie of Thebes, a new Canter¬ 
bury Tale, told by himself as be imagines himself 
joining Chaucer’s pilgrims, the Troy Books (1420), 
the Tales of Princes and London Lickpenny , a de¬ 
scription of the pageants attending the entrance of 
Henry VI. into London. Lydgate was a monk of 
the Benedictine monastery at Bury St. Edmunds. 
The Tales of the Princes is the most interesting and 
least crude of his poems. In early life, he cared 
little for his monastic duties. Later, he became 
very devout and wrote lives of St. Alban and St. 
Edmund. 

38. Neither Gower, Occleve, nor Lydgate deserves 
special attention. The period between Chaucer 
and Spenser was dreary. The Scotch poets some¬ 
what redeem it. They introduce a well defined 
Celtic element into English poetry. They are less 
sad than the English, and their humor is not “ sick- 
lied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” 

39. John Barbour (1316-1395), was the first im¬ 
portant Scotch poet. He studied both at Oxford 
and at Paris. He wrote The Bruce, in Chaucerian 
English. Before him was Huchoun, of whom so 
little is known that he is claimed both by England 
and Scotland. 

40. James I., of Scotland (1394-1437). He was 


32 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


captured by the English in 1405, and kept prisoner 
at various places in England until 1424. In that 
year he married Lady Jane Beaufort, a grand¬ 
daughter of that John of Gaunt who had been 
Chaucer’s patron. She was the heroine of his prin¬ 
cipal poem, The King's Qnair (The King’s Book). 
Christ's Kirk on the Green , a humorous poem, is 
attributed to him. He reigned thirteen years in 
Scotland; he was assassinated in 1437. 

41. Robert Henryson, Chaucer’s best imitator, 
wrote some beautiful fables. Curtis gives his 
poems a high place, because of their refined lan¬ 
guage and his grace of form. In The Three Dead 
Fowis (skulls), he anticipated Hamlet’s famous 
speech on the skull of Yorick. His Fobyne and 
Makyne is the earliest English pastoral. Little is 
known of his life; but it is certain that in 1462 he 
was at the University of Glasgow, that he was a 
schoolmaster at Dunfermline, and also a notary 
public there. 

42. William Dunbar was the most original of the 
Scotch poets succeeding Chaucer. He was bom 
about 1465. He entered as a novice the Franciscan 
Order, but became convinced that he had no voca¬ 
tion for that life. He received an annuity from 
James IV. of Scotland, and was the recognized poe^ 
of the court. His masterpiece is The Dance of the 
Deadly Sins . The Golden Targe and The Thistle 
and the Rose are allegories, rich in pictorial lan- 


THE CELTIC INFLUENCE 


33 


guage, but full of Latinisms. Dunbar had great 
power of vivid description; he paints a ship as “ a 
blossom on a spray,” and says that " the skies rang 
with the shouting of the larks.” Dunbar was a de¬ 
vout Catholic, and he became occasionally satirical 
against abuses in discipline contrary to the teaching 
of the Church. 

43. Gawain Douglas was a son of the Earl of An¬ 
gus, born about 1475. At that time, when learning 
was despised by the turbulent Scotch, Gawain Doug¬ 
las devoted himself to study and took his degree at 
the University of St. Andrew in 1494. His father, 
Earl Angus, is represented as saying, — 

“ Thanks to St. Bothan, son of mine, 

Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line.” 

In 1501 he published his Palace of Honour; in 
1513 he finished his translation of Virgil’s PEneid. 
He was consecrated Bishop of Dunkeld in 1515. 
The date of King Hart , another poem, is uncertain. 
He died, exiled, in London, in 1522. 

44. The Celtic Influence is shown in these Scotch 
poets. They have keen perception, deep melan¬ 
choly, and a quick fancy. It must be remembered 
that though the derivation of the most useful and 
forcible words in the English language is Teutonic, 
the form of the language is not. It is to the Celtic 
element in the English language, the element we have 
in common with the Welsh, the Gaels, the Scotch, 

3 


34 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


and the Irish, that the English language owes much 
If Chaucer had helped to Saxonize the form of 
the English language, as well as the words, we 
should have a language nearer to the German in 
manner. The difference may be shown by a quo¬ 
tation, suggested by Matthew Arnold. An English 
newspaper would say: “ After the preparations for 
the banquet in honor of the delegates, the police 
closed the approach to Giirzenich.” But the Cologne 
Zeitung might have put it: “ After the preparations 
for-tbe-at-the-Gurzenich-Saale-in-honor-of-the-dele- 
gates-banquet-given completely made had been, took 
already-to-day-at-morning the-by-order-of-the-police- 
closing of the way to Giirzenich place.” 

You observe that there is a great difference be¬ 
tween the modern English and the modern German 
form of expression. You would do well, too, to 
observe how many English words, like “ house,” 
“ father,” “ mother,” “ daugher,” “ son,” “ hound,” we 
have borrowed from the Teutonic of the Saxons. 

45. Minor English Poets.— Stephen Hawes (about 
1520) was a disciple of Lydgate. He was born in 
Suffolk, educated at Oxford, travelled in France, and 
was Groom of the Privy Chamber to Henry VII. 
His principal work is The Pastime of Pleasure; or, 
The Historie of Graunde Amoure and La Belle Pu - 
cell, written about 1506 and printed in 1517. It is 
an allegorical poem of chivalry. He imitated the 
Provencal school. His most famous couplet is: — v 


SIR DAVID LYNDESAY 


35 


“ For though the day be never so long, 

At last the bell ringeth to evensong.” 

Alexander Barclay (1476-1552) was known main¬ 
ly as a translator and imitator. The Ship of 
Fools and kis Eclogues are his most important 
works. 

46. John Skelton (1460-1529). — Skelton was tu¬ 
tor to Henry VIII., laureate of three universities, 
and admired by scholars. Skelton became a priest, 
but did little credit to his sacred ministry. He was 
versatile and original. He wrote much doggerel and 
some Latin satire. His principal poems are The 
Poke of Philip Sparoive and The Poke of Colin Clout 
He also wrote several plays. 

47. Sir David Lyndesay (1490-1555) wrote The 
Three Estates, a play acted before James V. of 
Scotland and his court. The play lasted nine 
hours. In his poem called The Dreme , he de¬ 
scribes a journey into the infernal regions, and 
also the past ages of the world. The Testament of 
the King's Papyngo is a satire, full of fury, as is, al¬ 
so, The Tragedy of the Cardinal, on the fall of Car¬ 
dinal Beaton. Lyndesay was utterly intolerant; he 
was a disciple of John Knox, the Scotch iconoclast, 
who had many Scripture texts on his lips and but 
little Christian charity in his heart. His pages are 
disfigured by indecency, and though he wrote really 
poetic lines he was not a worthy disciple of Chau¬ 
cer. The literary descendant of the Scotch poets 


36 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


was Robert Burns, who inherited their peculiarly 
better qualities. 

48. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey may 

be called the morning stars of that glorious day 
which lias lasted, with but few clouds, from the 
reign of Elizabeth to the present time. It is bitterly 
regretted that the English people blindly followed 
the tyrant Henry VIII. in his defiance of the suc¬ 
cessor of St. Peter. It has been said many times 
that the glories of English literature owe their later 
splendor to the Reformation. To show how false 
this is, we have only to remember that Wyatt and 
Surrey, the mild stars who preceded Spenser and 
Shakspere, owe their inspiration, and the forms 
their inspiration took, to the Italians. Petrarca was 
the father of the Italian sonnet. Wyatt and Surrey 
introduced it into English literature. They also 
made fashionable that other form of the sonnet 
which Sir Philip Sidney and Shakspere used to 
such advantage. 

49. The Petrarcan Sonnet is stricter than the 
Shaksperian. It is not out of place here to explain 
a poetical form of which all English and American 
poets have been fond. The Petrarcan sonnet, and 
indeed all sonnets, should be an exercise in logic as 
well as an expression of a poetical thought. The 
first eight lines, called the octave, are the premise; 
the second six, called the sextette, are the conclu¬ 
sion. The sonnet should be written in pentameter 


THE PETRARCAN SONNET 


37 


iambic. Study and imitation of it will be well 
repaid. Sometimes trochees are introduced. Four 
of the most beautiful sonnets in the English lan¬ 
guage are Milton’s On his Blindness, Keats’ On 
Reading Chapman's Homer , Wordsworth’s Scorn not 
the Sonnet, and one of Aubrey de Yere’s, beginning 
“ God of our Youth.” We give the rhyme-endings 
for a Petrarcan sonnet: — 


.g°l d 

.seen 

.been 

.hold: 

..told 

.demesne, 

.serene 

.bold: 

. ... skies 

.ken 

. ways 

.. eyes 

.men 

.days. 

Wordsworth’s sonnet is not of the strict Italian 
form, but it will repay study: 


“Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, 
Mindless of its just honors. With this key 
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody 
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; 
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; 
With it Camoens soothed an exile’s grief; 
















38 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf 
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned 
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, 

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land 
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp 
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand 
The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
Soul-animating strains — alas, too few ! ” 

The form used by Shakspere and Sir Philip 
Sidney is similar to this. Liberty is allowed in the 
construction of the sextette. It frequently ends 
with a rhymed couplet. 

50. To Wyatt and Surrey is due the introduction 
of lyrics into English poetry; and to Surrey, the 
introduction of blank verse. Wyatt was about four¬ 
teen years older than Surrey, and it is probable that 
the former’s influence made the latter the first of 
our writers of lyrics. Wyatt’s poems are imitations 
of verses in Spanish, French, and Italian. They 
consist of lyrics, sonnets, rondeaux, epigrams, and a 
version of the Penitential Psalms, after the manner 
of Dante and Alamanni. He was born at Allington 
Castle, in Kent, in 1503. He was the oldest son of 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Bart. He was one of the orna¬ 
ments of the Court of Henry VIII. He was a 
statesman and a diplomatist; he died on October 11, 
1542. His poems were first printed in 1557. 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was born about 
the year 1517. He became Earl of Surrey when 
his father succeeded to the dukedom of Norfolk, in 


WYATT AND SURREY 


39 


1524. Little is known of Surrey’s life. He, like 
the majority of courtiers, whatever their convictions 
were, outwardly adopted the new opinions enforced 
by Henry VIII. He, too, was one of the victims of 
that unhappy tyrant; he was beheaded on January 
19 or 20, 1547. The real reason of his execution is 
a mystery. His poems are original, musical, clear, 
and exquisitely wrought. His sonnets are better 
than Wyatt’s, because he does not allow their diffi¬ 
cult form to interfere with the thought. Mr. Chur- 
ton Collins says: “ In Surrey we find the first germs 
of the Bucolic Eclogue. In Wyatt we have our first 
classical satirist. Of lyrical poetry they were the 
founders.” Surrey’s poems appeared with Wyatt’s 
in Totters Miscellany. 

George Gascoigne, who preceded Spenser and was 
“ popular during Sliakspere’s boyhood and Spenser’s 
youth,” was the author of some of the earliest Eng¬ 
lish dramas. The comedy The Supposes and the 
tragedy Jocasta, are both his. He wrote blank 
verse, somewhat inferior to his lyrics. He was 
bom about 1536 ; he died in 1577. 

Thomas Sackville, born in 1536, at Buckhurst, in 
Sussex, was a predecessor of Spenser. He wrote in 
seven-line stanzas. He planned the Mirror for 
Magistrates , for which he wrote an Induction , a 
preface, and the Story of Henry Stafford, Duke of 
Buckingham, which contains his imitation of Dante, 
stately and solemn. With Thomas Norton, he wrote 


40 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


the first English tragedy that has come down to us, 
Gorboduc; or, Ferrex and Par rex, acted in 1561. 
He was made Lord Buckhurst and Lord High 
Treasurer by Queen Elizabeth, and Earl of Dorset 
in 1604. He died in 1608. He is remarkable for 
having influenced the poetry of Spenser. 


CHAPTER IY 


Early English Prose 

51. The Travels of Sir John Maundeville is said to 
be the first example of formal English prose. Chau¬ 
cer himself wrote at least one of his tales in prose, and 
Higden’s Pulychronicon was translated in that form 
in 1387. In the fifteenth century Fortescue, Caxton, 
Pecock, and Malory arose. To William Caxton, the 
great English printer, belongs the honor of having 
helped to ‘preserve the works of Chaucer; he also 
printed Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte <PArthur, a book 
which, through the medium of Lord Tennyson’s 
Idyls has largely influenced modern poetry. 
Reginald Pecock wrote in vigorous English against 
the sect of Lollards. His pamphlet against the 
Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy was written in 
1449, when he was Bishop of Chichester. He was 
one of the first religous controversialists who wrote 
in English. Sir John Fortescue’s Difference between 
Absolute and Limited Monarchy is a fair example 
of English prose of the fifteenth century. 

Sir Thomas Elyot, a contemporary and friend of 
More’s, is an important writer of treatises. 


42 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


William Caxton himself wrote prose. He trans¬ 
lated the first book ever printed in the English lan¬ 
guage. It was called The recuyell (compilation) 
of the History of Troy. He translated it from the 
French and published it at Cologne in 1471.. Caxton 
was born in Kent, England, in 1426. He was sent 
to Holland and Flanders as the agent for the Mer¬ 
cers’ Company. While there he heard of the newly 
invented art of printing. He had always been noted 
for his patience and energy. These were required 
to learn the new art in its primitive stage. In 1476 
he returned to England, and in 1477 he issued the 
first book printed in England, which contains this 
inscription: “ Here endeth the booh named the dictes or 
sayengis of the philosophres emprynted by me William 
Caxton at Westminster the yere of our Lord MCCCC 
LXXVIJ.” A full list of Caxton’s works may be 
found in Timperly’s History of Printing. He died 
in 1491. The revival of classic literature helped to 
develop a taste for reading. The Paston Letters , 
a collection of the correspondence of an English 
country family (1422-1505), show that the English 
gentlemen of that time were much better read than 
similar personages in the eighteenth century, and 
that they took more pleasure in reading good books. 

The Influence of the Italian Renaissance (the re¬ 
vival of classic studies in Italy, about 1453) made 
itself felt in England. Such students as Lord Tip- 
toft, the Earl of Worcester; Duke Humphrey of 


EARLY ENGLISH PROSE 


43 


Gloucester; Robert Flemmyng, Dean of Lincoln; 
John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells; William Grey, 
Bishop of Ely; John Phraes, Provost of Balliol; and 
William Sellynge, Fellow of All Saints College, were 
stimulated by residence in Italy. From Chaucer 
down, we find that English literature owes much to 
the Italians. 

52. Sir Thomas More 1 (1478-1535) was the greatest 
prose writer and the greatest and best man of his 
time. Thomson, the author of “ The Seasons,” wrote 
of him: — 

“ Like Cato firm, like Aristides just, 

Like rigid Cincinnatus nobly poor — 

A dauntless soul erect, who smiled on death.” 

Thomas More — knighted and made Sir Thomas 
More by Henry VIII. — was born in London, in 1478. 
He showed early signs of talent and limitless industry, 
which, together, are said to make genius. He was 
humorous yet grave, genial but just; he had a wit 
that stimulated rather than bit, and no power on 
earth could move him when his decision was founded 
on a principle. As he grew older, all the best qual¬ 
ities of his nature strengthened. In the household of 
the Archbishop of Canterbury he received a sound 
religious education. He entered Oxford at the age 
of fourteen; he entered Parliament at twenty-six. 
He gained the confidence of all classes; he was sent 

1 See Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More , by T. E. Bridgett. 


44 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


on a mission to the Low Countries in 1515. In 1529, 
on the disgrace of Cardinal Wolsey, he was made 
Lord Chancellor by the King. If Henry VIII. ex¬ 
pected that Sir Thomas More would be an instrument 
of his atrocious tyranny, he was disappointed. The 
King, who earlier had been a great patron of letters, 
admired and respected More; he knew, too, that 
More’s reputation would perhaps silence many critics 
who were horrified by his intention to cast aside 
his wife, the good Queen Katharine of Aragon. But 
More was, above all, a Christian. Henry might have 
learned a lesson from the experience of his predeces¬ 
sor, Henry II., who had promoted Thomas a Becket 
to the highest office in the realm, and then learned 
that a true Christian cannot be bribed. 

St. Thomas k Becket had defended the rights of 
the Church and the people, and Sir Thomas More 
followed his example. He would not take the oath 
of Supremacy which the King made obligatory. 
This oath made the King the spiritual superior of 
the Church in England. It was as unreasonable 
and tyrannical as if the Governor of New York 
were to force each citizen to swear that he was in¬ 
fallible in matters of faith and morals. Sir Thomas 
suffered, as St. Thomas k Becket had suffered before 
him. He was beheaded, with the learned and gentle 
Bishop Fisher. He went to his death smiling; 
hence Thomson’s beautiful lines. Recently he and 
Bishop Fisher, with some other English martyrs, 


EARLY ENGLISH PROSE 


45 


were beatified by the Church, and we may now call 
the author of Utopia “ Blessed.” 

53. The “ Utopia ” of Sir Thomas More is his most 
important work, but not an example of his prose. It 
was written in Latin, and, later, translated. It is 
the description of an ideal kingdom, — a work of 
imagination, with a solid lesson. More wrote, in 
1513, the first history in the English language. It 
was printed in 1557. It was entitled a History of 
Edward V. and his brother , and of Bichard III. 
No writer has ever lessened the authenticity of this 
history. It is the most trustworthy account of the 
horrible dealings of the infamous Richard III. with 
the little princes. Sir Thomas More — we may now 
call him the Blessed Thomas More — was remark¬ 
able for his prudence, gentleness, truthfulness. He 
had every quality which should characterize a saint, 
a hero, and a man of genius. Erasmus, a famous 
scholar of his time, crossed from the Continent to 
see him. They met at dinner, not knowing each 
other. Erasmus, who was an adept in lively talk, 
which did not always spare sacred things, attacked 
the doctrine of transubstantiation. Sir Thomas took 
up his gay sallies and keen arguments in his own 
way. Erasmus was astonished. More’s logic and 
wit were invincible. 1 “ Aut tu Morns es , ant nul- 
lus ! ” (You are either More or no one!); and More 
replied with equal quickness, “ Aut es Erasmus , aut 
l This anecdote is not authenticated by Father Bridgett. 


46 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Diabolus! ” (Yon are either Erasmus or the 
Devil!) More was twice married. His first wife 
was the daughter of Mr. John Colt; she died, leaving 
him three daughters and a son. He then married 
Mistress Alice Middleton, a talkative and ignorant 
woman, who gave him but little comfort; but Sir 
Thomas was of such a pious and genial nature that 
no arrogance could spoil his good temper. He was 
martyred at the age of fifty-six years and five 
months. 

54. William Tindale, born in 1484 — died in 1536, 
was a forcible writer of English prose. We have 
seen that the earliest book in English was the para¬ 
phrase made by Caedmon, under the patronage of 
the Abbess Hilda. Tindale is much praised for 
having “ opened the Bible to the English people ” by 
translating the New Testament from the Greek and 
Hebrew. Wyclif, whose peculiar theories had 
helped to deluge England with blood, had para¬ 
phrased Bible texts from the Latin of the Vulgate. 
Henry VIII. looked on the distribution of Tindale’s 
New Testament among the common people — many 
of whom could not read, and who must depend for its 
interpretation on others almost as ignorant as them¬ 
selves — as an offence against his government. He 
forced Tindale to flee from the country, and prose¬ 
cuted all who brought the translation into England. 
Finally, he grasped Tindale himself. Heresy with 
Henry VIII. meant any offence that might weaken 


EARLY ENGLISH PROSE 


47 


the people’s regard for his government; heresy was 
therefore treason. In 1536 Tindale was burned at 
the stake for heresy. Wyclif’s and Tindale’s ver¬ 
sions of the Scripture, though good examples of the 
English of their times, were even more doctrinally 
corrupt than the later King James’ version. The 
Church has always treated the sacred Scriptures with 
the utmost reverence ; she has forbidden the reading 
of corrupt versions, or versions not interpreted by 
herself; and the Douay version of the Bible is for 
sale everywhere, and is found in every Catholic 
household. Tindale wrote good English; but he 
taught the doctrine that every man might inter¬ 
pret the Bible for himself. 

55. Roger Ascham, who was born in 1515 and 
died in 1568, was tutor in Latin and Greek to Queen 
Elizabeth. He was the author of the Toxojohilus 
(from Toxon, a bow, and philos , a friend), a de¬ 
fence of archery, and The School-Master. He wrote 
good English, though he considered it necessary to 
apologize for writing in the vulgar tongue. “ He,” 
Ascham says, in this apology, “ that will write well 
in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aris¬ 
totle, to speak as the common people do, to think 
as wise men do: as so should every man under¬ 
stand him, and the judgment of wise men allow 
him.” 

56. Sir Philip Sidney, born in 1554, entered 
Oxford at the age of thirteen or eighteen. He left 


48 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


after remaining in the university five years, and 
began to travel on the Continent. On the night of 
August 24, 1572, when the French king and his 
evil-minded mother, Catherine de Medicis, put in 
motion the plot to massacre the Huguenots — whose 
leaders used religion for political purposes — Sir 
Philip was in Paris, and he took refuge from the 
murderers in the house of the English ambassador. 
Sir Philip was one of the few nobles of the time 
that seem to have been sincere Protestants, and his 
prejudices in favor of Henry VIII.’s new church 
were probably influenced by the hypocritical man¬ 
ner in which some of the Catholic French and 
Italian nobles made religion a cloak for crime. 

57. Sir Philip Sidney’s great reputation rests on 
his two prose works, Arcadia and the Defence 
of Poetry. While his verses are often artificial 
and conceited, his prose is extremely poetical. 
Cowper, the poet, calls him a “warbler of poetic 
prose.” Sir Philip Sidney was much influenced by 
the Italian amorous poets, whose artificial conceits 
are even more artificial in English than they seem 
to be in Italian. Sir Philip who came to be looked 
on as the French looked on the Chevalier Bayard or 
as the English now consider General Gordon, died 
at Zutplien in 1586. He was fighting for the 
Netherlands against Spain. His dying act was to 
give a drink of water, which had been brought for 
him, to a dying soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is 


EARLY ENGLISH PROSE 


49 


greater than mine.” Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie 
is better English prose than his somewhat fantastic 
Arcadia . 

58. Lyly’s “Euphues” (1579) marks the begin¬ 
ning of the later literary period of Elizabeth’s reign. 
Lyly’s work was in prose, though he also wrote 
poetry and plays. It is full of extravagances and 
absurd conceits. It became the fashion because it 
reflected the tone and manners of Elizabeth’s court. 
A new word “ Euphuism,” expressive of all that 
is strained and artificial, was created by it. Sir 
Thomas More and Sir Philip Sidney added “Uto¬ 
pian ” and “ Arcadian ” to the language, and at this 
time, owing to an industry of writers, the English 
vocabulary was constantly increasing. 


4 


CHAPTEB V 

Spenser 

59. The Greatest of the English Poets after Chaucer 

was Edmund Spenser, bom in 1552; but what is 
called Elizabethan literature began with Wyatt and 
Surrey. To them we owe that perfection of form 
which English poetry and English prose have 
attained; for prose composition is affected largely 
by the refinement and elegance of poets. Chaucer, 
as we have seen, borrowed his stories from the 
Italians, Dante and Boccaccio; Wyatt and Surrey 
now borrowed Italian poetical forms, or rather imi¬ 
tated them. 

60. The Early Elizabethan Period dates from 1559 
to 1579. From 1580 to 1603 was that later Eliza¬ 
bethan period so radiant in the annals of literature. 
This sudden burst of light came upon the English 
world like a sunburst after the darkness of early 
dawn; but Wyatt and Surrey, the writers of 
travels, the translators of Virgil and Ovid, and the 
many writers of detached verses, who went into 
print because of the example of Sir Philip Sidney, — 
above all, the makers of ballads, stimulated the be¬ 
ginning of a great literary movement. 


SPENSER 


51 


61. The First Collection of Poems was the Paradise 
of Dainty Devices , published in 1576. This and 
TotteVs Miscellany were the progenitors of the vast 
crowd of annuals, magazines, and poetical “ collec¬ 
tions ” which followed, increasing in number down 
to our own time. The taste for stories also grew. 
William Painter made a translation of many Italian 
tales, which he called The Palace of Pleasure (1566), 
and George Turberville’s Tragical Tales , with new 
versions of Amadis of Gaul , the Athenian legends, 
and the Grecian myths, might be found everywhere. 
Plays of all kinds were produced; masques, which 
were lyrical plays, full of spectacular effects, became 
the fashion. 1 The public mind was quickened by 
the mass of imaginative material it suddenly beheld. 
Men who wrote strove to write as elegantly as 
Wyatt and Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney, who them¬ 
selves had tried to equal Petrarca and Ariosto. 
Sackville’s poems in the Mirror for Magistrates 
(1559) and Gascoigne’s Steel Glass , a satirical poem 
(1576) belong to this period. 

62. With Spenser a new force came into English 
literature. Born, as we have seen, about the middle 
of that remarkable century which ended some years 
after the death of Elizabeth, Edmund Spenser was 
educated at one of the grammar-schools founded 
and endowed by the Merchant Tailors’ Company, 
from whence he went up to Cambridge in 1569, and 

1 See description of one in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Kenilworth. 


52 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


acquired the degree of M.A. some seven years later. 
Little is known of his university career, except 
two friendships which he formed there, one at least 
of which had a potent influence on his mind. 
Edmund Kirke, who was like Spenser a sizar of 
Pembroke Hall, has recently been identified as the 
“ E. K.” who edited and concentrated our poet’s 
earliest work, the anonymous Shepherd’s Calendar; 
but unfortunately little else is known about him. 
The other friend, Gabriel Harvey, was Spenser’s 
elder by many years. He was a fellow of Pem¬ 
broke, and afterwards a student and teacher of civil 
law at Trinity Hall. Harvey, “ the happy above 
happiest men,” had in his day a high reputation as 
a classical scholar, was well read in Italian litera¬ 
ture, was, moreover, a sound critic, and doubtless had 
some share in the formation of Spenser’s ideas. 
Spenser did not return immediately to London after 
quitting Cambridge. A mist hangs round his so¬ 
journ in Lancashire; but it has an interest from 
the fact that he seems to have gained an experience 
which stimulated his nascent genius and gave color 
to his thoughts. ' y. ' 

In 1579 we find him in London, the friend of 
Philip Sidney, busy with the “new” Shepherd’s 
Calendar and the first conceptions of his great 
masterpiece, the Faerie Queene. In the winter of 
1579 the Shepherd’s Calendar was published anony¬ 
mously. The time was ripe for a new poet. Since 


SPENSER 


53 


Chaucer had been laid in his grave, almost two cen¬ 
turies before, the realization of his splendid promise 
had been, if not altogether checked, retarded. The 
civil strife known as the wars of the Roses, and the 
religious troubles which accompanied the so-called 
Reformation, were antagonistic to the development 
of the literary spirit. But in 1580 a reign of com¬ 
parative peace had succeeded these dissensions, and 
the nation looked from the midst of its growing 
prosperity for some worthy, successor of him whom 
Michael Drayton called — 

“ The first of those that ever brake 
Into the Muse’s treasure, and first spake 
In weighty numbers. 5 ' 

Under such circumstances appeared the Shepherd's 
Calendar. The poem consists of twelve eclogues, 
having no internal link with each other except that 
each is assigned to a different month of the year. 
The subjects are various: the course of true love; 
satires on the indolence of the clergy; one in praise 
of the Queen, “ fair Eliza; ” two of them fables of “ The 
Oak and the Briar” and “The Fox and the Kid.” 
Dry den goes so far as to say that the Shepherd's Cal¬ 
endar is not matched in any language, and ranks the 
author with Theocritus and Virgil; but we need not 
go quite so far as this and yet acknowledge the poet¬ 
ical power and beauty of the poem, and the new 
spirit which Spenser has breathed into the English 
of Chaucer which he borrowed. 


54 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


In this same year, 1580, Spenser went to Ireland 
as secretary to Lord Grey, who had been sent by 
Elizabeth as Lord-Deputy to that country, and in 
his company no doubt witnessed those sad scenes of 
Irish life, an exaggerated account of which he has 
embodied in his View of the Present State of Ire¬ 
land. In 1586 the poet was appointed clerk of the 
Council of Munster, and granted the manor and cas¬ 
tle of Kilcolman, and it was in the midst of the 
beautiful scenery which abounds in the neighbor¬ 
hood of that residence that he composed the first 
three books of his masterpiece, the Faerie Qucene. 

63. The Faerie Queene.— The germ of this great 
work was, as we have intimated, sown early in Spen¬ 
ser’s literary career; but it grew in secret, until it 
blossomed on the banks of the Mulla which flowed 
through the Kilcolman demesne. One likes to fancy 
the scene as the gentle Spenser poured the story 
of his allegory into the enraptured ears of Raleigh 
under the shadow of the castle. Out of respect for 
the Puritanical ideas prevalent at the time, Spenser 
thought it necessary to shape his thoughts into a 
work on moral philosophy. The poem had an avow¬ 
edly didactic aim. In a prefatory letter addressed 
to Raleigh he unravels the moral he had “ cloudily 
enwrapped in allegorical devises.” But, in truth, 
the work has no well-defined plan. It is a network 
of allegories, always beautiful indeed, but loosely 
connected, and confused still more by endless 


SPENSER 


55 


L * digressions whithersoever the poet’s fancy led him. 
The leading idea of the struggle of Good and Evil — 
of the trials which beset man’s life in all conditions 
and at all times — runs, like a golden vein, through¬ 
out the poem, at one time hidden by a profusion of 
rich imagery, anon losing itself in the mazes of 
charming fancy, but never completely obscured. 
The twelve books were intended to portray the war¬ 
fare of the twelve knights (Aristotle’s twelve vir¬ 
tues) with the powers of Evil. The machinery was 
borrowed (as the poet admits in the prefatory letter) 
from the popular Celtic legends about King Arthur, 
and his ideas of moral philosophy from the Aristo¬ 
telian categories current among the schoolmen. In 
Arthur, before he was king, is portrayed the image 
of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private 
moral virtues, who is ultimately to aspire to the 
hand of the faerie queene, the one and only bride of 
man’s spirit, endowed with humility and innocence. 
Only six books, however — the legends of Holiness, 
Temperance, Chastity, of Friendship, Justice, and 
Courtesy — were finished, and thus only a portion of 
the great allegory remains. Parallel with this spirit¬ 
ual allegory Spenser introduces an historical one, in 
which Elizabeth is Gloriana, and Mary Queen of 
Scots is Duessa, and Leicester, and occasionally Sid¬ 
ney, is Prince Arthur, and Raleigh is Timias. 

As an allegory the poem has many faults. It 
does not bear its story on the surface; it is involved 


56 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


and intertwisted in parts so that the mind is con¬ 
fused with too much ornament, and is content to 
lose itself in the splendor of the imagery; it is not 
consecutive or well-ordered. But if it is art run 
riot, what splendid art it is! What fancy, what 
music, what a sense of beauty! With truth indeed 
is Spenser called the poet’s poet, for since his time 
the Faerie Queene has nourished at its source the 
singers of the centuries that have come and gone. 

Raleigh was delighted with the new poem, and 
took Spenser to England, where he received the 
adulation of the court. In the following year 
(1591) he collected and published his minor poems, 
including The Ruins of Time , the Tears of the 
Muses, and Mother Hubberd’s Tale, a satire on the 
Church and society. The poet returned to Ireland 
in the same year, wrote his Colin Clout *s Come 
Home Again, an account of the court of Elizabeth, 
and married a lady whose Christian name, Eliza¬ 
beth, alone survives. To her he addressed his Son¬ 
nets, full of quaint fancy and sweetness, and the 
incomparable wedding ode, the Fpithalamium, the 
finest composition of its kind in the language. The 
year after his marriage he went over to London with 
three more books of the Faerie Queene, having thus 
completed half of his cherished plans. 

His death was in contrast to his life. During the 
Munster insurrection of 1598, his castle at Kilcol- 
man was sacked and burned, and, according to some 


SPENSER 


57 


untruthful accounts, a child of his perished in the 
flames. Spenser and his wife escaped to London; 
but he was broken-hearted, and died January 16, 
1599. He rests in Westminster Abbey, near the 
grave of Chaucer. 


CHAPTER VI 


Prose — 1561-1731 

64. Lord Bacon (1561-1626) is called the father 
of the Inductive Method of Philosophy. But he did 
not deserve this title, as Aristotle’s method is both 
deductive and inductive. He gave English philoso¬ 
phy a turn towards that method which draws its con¬ 
clusions from experience. Like his ancestors, the 
Saxons, he had no talent for abstract reasoning. 
Francis Bacon, Viscount Verulam, wrote admirable 
English prose in his two books on The Advancement 
of Learning (1605). Bacon did not believe in the 
permanency of the English language, so he expanded 
it into nine Latin books in 1623. He finished it and 
the Novum Organum in 1620. These and the His- 
toria Naturalis et Experimentalis, published in 1622, 
formed what he called the Instauratio Magna. The 
last edition of his essays, which, for their compressed, 
masterly style, rank among the most important ex¬ 
amples of English prose, appeared in 1625. Bacon 
also wrote a History of Henry VIII. 

65. Sir Walter Raleigh sketched the History of the 
World while in prison; the poet Daniel wrote a 


PROSE —1561-1731 


59 


History of England to the time of Edward III. 
Daniel, in his literary style, was the precursor of 
picturesque historians, like Macaulay and Froude. 
Holinslied and Harrison's Description and History 
of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577) suggested 
to Shakspere the plots of many of his plays. 

Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (1594-7), 
a theological work, is of some literary merit for its 
style. 

John Selden wrote the History of Titles and 
Titles of Honor. The writer of plays, Thomas May, 
wrote a History of the Parliament of 16If). Thomas 
Fuller’s Church History of Britain appeared in 
1656. 

66. Travel and Miscellaneous Works: — Henry 
Wotton’s Letters from Italy, and Samuel Purchas' 
enlargement of Hakluyt’s Voyages (1613). The 
fashion of writing descriptions of personal charac¬ 
ters, borrowed from the Greek, was begun by Sir 
Thomas Overbury (1614), and carried on by Earle 
and Hall. Philemon Holland (1552-1637) is the 
most important of the band of writers who devoted 
themselves to the work of translating books of 
ancient classical authors. Thomas Fuller’s Holy 
and Profane State (1642), and his Worthies, cre¬ 
ated an appetite for biographies. Fuller’s Worthies, 
like Plutarch's Lives, is deservedly a classic. Robert 
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Sir 
Thomas Browne’s Beligio Medici (1642) might be 


60 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


called glimpses of all sorts of subjects. In James 
I/s reign, Sir Thomas Bodley established his famous 
Bodleian Library at Oxford. Sir Robert Cotton’s 
library was likewise founded. We need not trouble 
ourselves with the names of a host of sectarian con- 
troversalists. Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler , a 
serene and gentle book, lives to this day, though 
Izaak fished over two hundred years ago (1653). 
Among the theological works, whose style had all 
the Elizabethan poetry, with new and added qualities, 
may be named Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesy¬ 
ing , 1647. Hobbes’ Leviathan , a philosophical work, 
rich in style, appeared in 1651. Hobbes, like all 
English philosophers, except Newman, is more re¬ 
markable for the clearness of his language than the 
subtlety of his reasoning. The style of the later 
men was less poetic, but stronger than that of the 
Elizabethans. 

67. Queen Anne, who ascended the English 
throne in 1702, was not an intellectual woman or 
even a clever one, but nevertheless a splendid epoch 
in English letters borrowed her name. The period 
succeeding her coming to the throne has been called 
the Augustan Age of English Literature, because the 
writers of that period are said to have done for the 
English tongue what Virgil and Horace did for 
the Latin language under Augustus. The truth is 
that the writers of the Queen Anne period were great 
because of their ancestors. Joseph Addison and Sir 


PROSE — 1561-1731 


61 


Richard Steele were literary descendants of Cowley 
and Sir William Temple; and these writers imitated 
the great French author Montaigne — a volume of 
whose essays is the only book now existing known 
to have been owned by Shakspere. 

68. Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele invented 
periodical literature; they were in England the 
fathers of the magazine. Sir Richard Steele, born 
in Dublin, in 1672, of English parents, was educated 
at Merton College, Oxford. His friends refused to 
buy him a commission in the army, and he enlisted 
as a common soldier. He was promoted to the 
rank of captain. He seems to have been a kind- 
hearted, somewhat reckless, brilliant man. He was 
certainly a more interesting character than Addison, 
whom Macaulay exalts at his expense. Steele was 
humorous and pathetic, and he had studied human 
nature with sympathy. In the Tatler (1709), we 
enjoy the reflection of these qualities. He touches 
the foibles and fashions, the vices and virtues of his 
time, without bitterness. Addison joined him in The 
Tatler and, later (1711), in The Spectator. Together, 
they introduced a new form into literature, and if the 
drama was the expression of literature in Sliak- 
spere’s time, as the novel is now, the short, semi- 
humorous half-satirical essay was the expression of 
Pope’s time. After a time these charming essays 
were printed daily, and The Spectator , The Guardian , 
and The Freeholder , were largely looked for by all 


62 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


people of taste. Addison refined English prose style 
and supplied the elegance of diction that Steele 
wanted. Addison, judged by our modern ideas, 
lacked many of the literary qualities for which his 
contemporaries most esteemed him. Grammatical 
errors can be pointed out in nearly all his essays, 
and Blair’s analysis of his style (see Blair's Rheto¬ 
ric) is not only useful to students, but destructive to 
the claim of Addison’s admirers, that he was the 
most polished writer of all time. In 1701, Steele 
published The Christian Hero , in which he shows 
that he repented his reckless habits. Steele wrote 
plays, and political and anti-popery tracts. His peri¬ 
odical papers and those he wrote with Addison 
made his reputation and Addison owed as much to 
Steele as Steele owed to him. Steele held important 
government appointments, for, as Macaulay says, 
at no time was literature so splendidly appreciated 
by the State as during the reigns of William and 
of Anne. 

69. Joseph Addison was a correct writer as to 
cadence and elegance; he was a fine writer without 
bombast; he was a constant student of the art of 
expression, not of human nature. He was not so 
good-humored as Steele, and his allusions to women 
are more satirical and less kindly. He was born at 
Litchfield and educated at Charterhouse. His poem 
on the victory of Blenheim made his reputation 
(1704), and he was appointed Under-Secretary of 


PROSE —1561-1731 


63 


State. He married the dowager Countess of War¬ 
wick ; he died in 1719, leaving a daughter. The 
Tcttler was begun by Steele under the pen-name of 
Isaac Bickerstaff, and it appeared three times a 
week. Addison’s first contribution appeared in Ho. 
20, May 26. On the demise of The Tcttler, Steele 
began The Spectator, which lasted from March 1, 
1711, to December 6, 1712; it was issued daily. 
Addison wrote about half a number. It was suc¬ 
ceeded by The Guardian ; after this The Spectator 
was resumed. The Freeholder was a bi-weekly writ¬ 
ten by Addison himself. Daniel Defoe conducted 
The Review, a periodical which differed from Steele’s 
and Addison’s, by touching politics. Defoe, Steele, 
and Addison deserve the credit of having called the 
attention of their contemporaries to “ Paradise Lost.” 
Addison lives because of his essays; his tragedy, 
Cato , has no life in it; parts of Blenheim are still 
quoted; but his creation, Sir Roger de Coverley, will 
not die as long as good literature is appreciated. 
Addison died in 1719. 

70. Daniel Defoe, it is said, wrote 250 works — 
religious treatises, commercial pamphlets, histories, 
and his great work, Robinson Crusoe. He was born 
in London, in 1661; he was educated for the dis¬ 
senting 1 ministry. Defoe has been called the first 
professional author, as he lived entirely by the sale 

i Dissenters in England are Protestants who do not belong to 
the Anglican Church. 


64 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


of his books. He published his first novel in 1719. 
It was Robinson Crusoe — one of the most remark¬ 
able books in our language. Defoe’s English is old- 
fashioned and not of the best old-fashion; but in 
his wonderful faithfulness to the details of human 
life and in his knowledge of human nature he stood 
almost alone. His political periodical, The Review 
(1704-1712), was the prototype of our weekly 
newspapers. His other novels were Captain Single- 
ton (1720), Duncan Campbell (1720), Moll Flan¬ 
ders (1721), Colonel Jack (1721), Journal of The 
Plague (1723), Roxana (1724), and the undated 
Memoir of a Cavalier . He died in 1731; he was a 
traveller, a politician, and a tireless writer. Profes¬ 
sor Minto truly says of Defoe: “ He is more openly 
derisive and less bitter than Addison, having no 
mastery of the polite sneer; he is not a loving 
humorist, like Steele, but sarcastically and derisively 
humorous; and he is more magnanimous and less 
personal than Swift.” 

71. Bishop Berkeley’s Minute Philosopher, in which 
he questioned the existence of matter, Mandeville’s 
Fable of the Bees , and Bishop Butler’s Analogy , still 
greatly read, are the principal metaphysical works of 
the Queen Anne period. 

72. To Dryden’s admirable prose essays, we owe 
the first real criticism in English. Izaak Walton, 
Cowley , and Hobbes , added to the treasury of prose. 
Later came Sir William Temple's essays. Sir Wil- 


PROSE— 1561-1731 


65 


liam was, according to Dr. Johnson, the first writer 
to make English prose musical. He was born in 
1628 and he died in 1699. He was a diplomatist, 
and was credited with arranging the marriage of 
William of Orange and the Princess Mary of Eng¬ 
land. His manner of writing prose was directly 
opposite to that of Dryden, who was brilliant in his 
essay, but careless, entirely disregarding the para¬ 
graph. The prose writers of the beginning of the 
reign of Queen Anne were party hacks or Bohemian 
toilers who degraded literature by using it as an 
instrument for flattering their patrons. At that 
time (1702), the patron held writers in his grasp. 
Maecenas was the rich friend of Horace, the most 
noble of Latin poets; but these English writers were 
the slaves of the patron. Dr. Johnson was the first 
to discard this vile servility, and to appeal to the 
public. The patron or patrons paid the writer, and, 
as a rule, the writer repaid them in flattery. The 
lighter prose up to 1702 had no representative 
except Lady Rachel Russell’s Letters , Pepys’ Diary 
(1660-69), and Evelyn’s Diary (1640). History 
was a collection of odds and ends, coarsely flavored 
with bigotry, such as Clarendon’s History of the 
Civil Wars (1641), and Bishop Burnet’s narrow¬ 
minded History of His Own Times and History of 
The Reformation. 

73. One of the Best examples of sound English 
prose is the Pilgrim's Progress of John Bunyan. 

5 


66 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


It was written for the common people of England; 
as a study of the Saxon element of the English lan¬ 
guage it is unexcelled. John Bunyan wrote some 
religious poems and The Holy City, in 1665. In 
1678, four years after the death of Milton, he wrote 
the Pilgrim's Progress. John Bunyan was a big¬ 
oted and ignorant man, but he produced a book 
which is almost a prose epic. As a good example 
of his style, the fight between Christian and Apol- 
lyon is to be recommended. Bunyan was the last 
prose author who reflected the spirit of the Com¬ 
monwealth, though he is generally classed among 
the Elizabethans. 


CHAPTER VII 


Spenser to ShaJespere, 1553-1593.— The Beginning 
of the Drama .— Marlowe 

74. Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar is the 

beginning of the later Elizabethan period of 
poetry; it appeared, without the poet’s name, in 
1579. Before Spenser and Sidney appeared in 
poetry—Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella sonnets 
came out in 1591— Englishmen thought it some¬ 
what undignified to publish poetry. Of Edmund 
Spenser’s Faerie Queene, it may be truly said that it 
is the poem best beloved of the poets. It is a series 
of the richest pictures. 

After 1580, came youthful and ardent poets, 
patriotic poets who brought the historical play into 
fashion, and the religious poet. The greatest of 
the class during Queen Elizabeth’s reign was the 
Jesuit, Robert Southwell. Southwell’s poems were 
very popular. They, strange to say, were as much 
read in England as the very sensuous verses so 
fashionable at the time. This shows that, in the 
reign of Queen Elizabeth, there were still many 
devout Catholics in the land, and also that the 


68 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


throwing off of the yoke of the Catholic Church 
in England was not due to a religious sentiment, but 
to the revolt of human nature against restraint; it was 
not that the Church was full of abuses, but that 
men wanted to be free from her rigid discipline. 

75. Robert Southwell, S. J ., 1 was the third son of 
Richard Southwell, a Catholic gentleman of Nor¬ 
folk. Robert was born at his father’s seat, Horsham, 
St. Faith’s, about the year 1560. There is a tradition 
to the effect that a gypsy woman made an attempt to 
steal him, in the hope of gain; and he never ceased, 
it is said, to show his gratitude to God for having 
saved him from a semi-savage and vagrant life. Al¬ 
though the Southwell family was Catholic, Richard 
Southwell never permitted his religion to stand in 
the way of his preferment; and in those days Cath¬ 
olics could obtain worldly advantage only by the sac¬ 
rifice of principle. Robert’s tendency towards the 
religious life was so strong that he was sent to Douay 
to be educated for the priesthood, and from there to 
Paris. This fact speaks well for his father, who 
risked much by having him educated abroad. 
Robert went from Paris to Rome, where he was 
received into the Society of Jesus. Early in the year 
1585 he applied for permission to return to England. 
The thought of souls perishing for the sacred nourish¬ 
ment that he could give them filled him with a solic- 

1 For further account of a group of Catholic poets, see Dr. 
Egan’s “Lectures on English Literature.” (VV. H. Sadlier & Co.) 


SPENSER TO SHAKSPEKE 


60 


itude that was agony, and he longed for the crown 
of martyrdom. The peril that faced him was not 
vague. “ Any papist,” according to the statute 27 
Elizabeth, c. 2, “ born in the dominions of the crown 
of England, who should come over thither from be¬ 
yond the sea (unless driven by stress of weather, and 
tarrying only a reasonable time), or should be in 
England three days without conforming and taking 
the oath, should be guilty of high treason.” South- 
well knew that a Jesuit was doubly obnoxious to the 
herd of Englishmen who blindly followed time-serv¬ 
ing leaders; he knew, too, that if discovered he 
would be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He did 
not shrink. Perhaps he reverently repeated the 
words of his “ Burning Babe ”:— 

“ Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and 
scorns. 

The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals; 

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls; 

For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good, 

So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood.” 

Southwell’s letter to his father, which he wrote 
soon after his return to England, shows that the poet 
who wrote “ St. Peter’s Complaint ” might as easily 
have spoken an apologia before the despots who in 
England imitated the persecutions of Diocletian in 
the name of “ reformation.” 

For six years Southwell labored in his native land. 
Many Catholic souls, even priests in hiding, were 


70 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


strengthened by his example and consoled by his 
fervent piety. His zeal made many return to the 
Church and saved others from apostasy. Protected 
by Lady Arundel, whose confessor he was, he per¬ 
formed his sacred duties and wrote at intervals; but 
the crown of martyrdom, like a pillar of fire, was 
always before him. It led to the Promised Land, 
and he was soon to gain the end for which he worked. 
He was kept in prison three years. At last, on his 
own petition, he was brought to trial. He was re¬ 
moved from the Tower of London to Newgate, and 
on the 21st of February, 1595, he was taken to West¬ 
minster and tried. His conduct before the court 
was worthy of his life. He was serene, manly, and 
not presumptuous. He denied that he was guilty of 
treason, but confessed that he was a Catholic priest, 
and that his purpose in England was to administer 
the rites of the Church to her faithful children. He 
was condemned, and on the morning of the 22d of 
February was executed at Tyburn. Through the 
blundering of the hangman his agony was prolonged, 
and he “ several times made the sign of the cross 
while hanging.” He was drawn and quartered; but 
“ through the kindness and interference of the by¬ 
standers the martyr was allowed to die before the 
indignities and mutilations were allowed.” And this 
happened in the reign of a woman whom historians 
have named “good,” and whom Englishmen have 
been taught to reverence as “ great ”! 


SPENSER TO SHAKSPERE 


71 


Southwell’s principal works were St. Peter's Com¬ 
plaint, Mary Magdalen's Tears, and a book in prose, 
Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears. One poem of liis, 
“ Times go by Turns,” is quoted almost as generally 
as Cardinal Newman’s “ Lead, Kindly Light.” 

76. In the year 1600 and after it, there was a 
great outburst of romantic poetry in England. Shak- 
spere, when not yet great, had written poems whose 
sensuousness is to be regretted. Thomas Lodge and 
Henry Constable, both Catholics, Thomas Carew, and 
others were of this romantic school. Spenser had led 
the way by his love-sonnets called Amoretti, and Sir 
Philip Sidney had also set the fashion by imitating 
the lighter poems of the Italians. William Drum¬ 
mond of Hawthornden was a Scotch poet of this 
period; he belongs properly to the time of James I., 
but he was evidently influenced by Sidney and 
Spenser. 

77. William Warner, Samuel Daniel, and Michael 
Drayton were born about 1560, and were writers of 
patriotic poetry. They gave poetry a national fla¬ 
vor. William Warner wrote Albion's England, 
1586, which sketches a history of England from the 
Deluge to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Samuel 
Daniel wrote a History of the Civil Wars , 1595, in 
admirable English, but bad poetry. In James I.’s 
reign (1613) Michael Drayton produced Polyolbion, 
in thirty books, written in Alexandrines. He had 
written before this time the Civil Wars of Edward 


72 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


II. and the Barons and England's Heroical Epis¬ 
tles. Drayton deserves to be ranked among English 
poets', though he wrote too much. The philosophi¬ 
cal poets who came into fashion as England became 
less in fear of war are Sir John Davies and Fulke 
Greville, Lord Brooke. Sir John Davies was the 
author of Nosce te ipsum, Know Thyself, and The 
Orchestra, and Lord Brooke wrote long didactic 
poems On Human Learning, On Wars, On Monarchy, 
and On Religion. But the great literary feature of 
the Elizabethan period was the rise of the drama to 
a grandeur unprophesied and unexpected. 

78. The English Drama began in the monasteries, 
where miracle plays were performed on certain 
feasts. A survival of these is the Passion Play 
given every ten years at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, 
by the peasants. It had gradually developed in 
England until Nicholas Udall wrote the first Eng¬ 
lish comedy, Ralph Roister Roister, which was acted 
in 1551. The first English tragedy was Gorboduc 
or Ferrex and For rex written by Sackville and Nor¬ 
ton, and played in 1562. There was no play-house 
in England until The Theatre was built at London 
in 1576. The Globe Theatre was built for Shak- 
spere and his actors in 1599. Boys took the parts 
of women; it would have been considered indecent 
if a woman |,had appeared as Rosalind, i n As You 
Like It, or as Portia , in The Merchant of Venice ; 
even Cordelia, the most gentle of Shakspere’s char- 


SPENSER TO SHAKSPERE 


73 


acters, except Ophelia , was acted by a boy. It was 
not until the licentious reign of Charles II. that 
females appeared on the stage and an attempt to 
have painted scenes was made. Shakspere’s plays 
were originally performed without illusory accesso¬ 
ries. If the great poet could see the modern superb 
mounting of Midsummer-Night's Dream , he would 
no doubt feel repaid for a journey back to “ the 
glimpses of the moon.” In his time a blanket was 
used for a curtain, and the audience, which assem¬ 
bled at three o’clock, imagined trees, castles, gar¬ 
dens, etc. 

79. The Play-writers before Shakspere were: George 
Gascoigne, who wrote the Supposes (acted in 1566, 
and taken from the Italian of Ariosto); Arthur 
Brooke, whose Romeo and Juliet may have sug¬ 
gested Shakspere’s — it is taken from the same 
story, — and T. Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur and 
the Famous Victories of Henry V. Then came — 
from 1580 to 1596 —Peele, Nash, Chettle, Munday, 
Greene, Lodge, Kyd, Marlowe, and Lyly, the author 
of Euphues. The greatest of these was Marlowe. 

80. Christopher Marlowe would have been a high 
name in English literature, had the personal charac¬ 
ter of the man who bore it been equal to his genius. 
He was born at Canterbury in England, in February, 
1564. He was educated at the King’s School in his 
birthplace, and at Corpus Christi College, Cam¬ 
bridge. His father was a shoemaker, and when 


74 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Marlowe developed atheistical opinions, there were 
men who openly regretted that he had not been for¬ 
cibly kept to his father’s business. But we see too 
much that is fine in his plays to endorse their 
opinions. Marlowe served with Elizabeth’s troops 
in the Netherlands, during the war of the Low 
Countries with Spain; in the army, the tone of 
which was very licentious, he acquired the Godless 
opinions and coarseness that unhappily found its 
way into some of his literary work. His transla¬ 
tions of Ovid’s Elegies gained the reprobation of 
moral Englishmen, and were burned by the hang¬ 
man. His Hero and Leander and Tamburlaine are 
too coarse to be read without expurgation. Freed 
from the dirt that encumbers it, Tamburlaine is a 
great drama. As Hallam says, Marlowe’s Dr. 
Faustus is a sketch by a great genius rather than a 
finished and complete play. The same verdict 
might be given of Edward II., The Jew of Malta, 
and Dido, Queen of Carthage. Marlowe was a poet 
of great promise, worthy to be a star that could only 
be dimmed by such a sun as Shakspere. He died 
as he had lived; he was killed in a brawl at Dept¬ 
ford, in 1593. 


CHAPTEE VIII 


Shakspere 

81. When Spenser was a youth, Shakspere was a 
boy. — Spenser, whom Wordsworth names 

“-mild Spenser, called from fairy land 

To struggle through dark ways,” 

died in January, 1598. Spenser was twelve years 
old when Shakspere was born; and Shakspere was 
thirty-four years old when Spenser died. 

Spenser, the most poetical of poets, greatest after 
Chaucer, was inspired by Italian genius. You have 
heard, and you will hear again, that 

“-those melodious hursts that fill 

The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
With sounds that echo still,” 1 

were the results of the change in religion, which 
followed the rebellion of Henry VIII. This assump¬ 
tion is a sign of ignorance. What Chaucer owed to 
Dante and Petrarca, Spenser owed to Tasso and 


1 Tennyson. 


76 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Ariosto. Without these great Italians — who were 
ardently Catholic — English poetry would perhaps 
now be only beginning to find suitable forms of 
expression. Let us rid ourselves at once of this 
fallacy. If English poetry exists to-day unrivalled 
in sweetness, strength, and symmetry, it is because 
Wyatt and Surrey, Spenser and Shakspere, Milton 
and Dryden, made the best use of those stores of 
classic lore and poetic forms which Christian ages 
had developed. Had Wyatt and Surrey not bor¬ 
rowed from the Italians, Shakspere would not have 
had models of the sonnet and of blank verse in his 
native speech; and had he not borrowed from the 
mediaeval Gesta Bomanorum , and from the Italians 
too, he would have found less stimulating themes on 
which to employ his wonder-working genius. 

Of Spenser, James Russell Lowell, one of our 
greatest poets and the most careful of our critics, 
says: — 

“ No man can read the «Faery Queen ’ and be any¬ 
thing but the better for it. Through that rude age when 
Maids of Honor drank beer for breakfast ... he passes 
serenely abstracted and high, the Hon Quixote of poets. 
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can 
tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, who¬ 
ever wishes to be rid of thought, and to let the busy 
anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in 
the ‘ Faery Queen.’ There is the land of pure heart’s 
ease,where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.” 


SHAKSPERE 


77 


82. There is in most biographies of Spenser an 
exaggeration. It is well to correct it. Spenser, as 
you know, was sent into Ireland as shrieve for the 
county of Cork. Ireland then, as now, was chafing 
under English rule; and even a great poet coming 
into that land with a commission from Queen Eliza¬ 
beth was made to feel that he had no business there. 
The kerns and gallow-glasses arose — indeed, they 
had provocation enough — and burned his castle 
He probably had warning, as Mr. Lowell says, of the 
wrath to come, and sent his wife and his four chil¬ 
dren into Cork. At any rate, there is no foundation, 
except rumor, for the assertion that one of his boys 
perished in the flames. Spenser looked on the Irish 
as savages and their country as a wilderness, and no 
doubt die was glad to find more congenial quarters, 
with two cantos of his poem, in London. Spenser 
died in moderate circumstances, but he was not 
poor. 

It would be ungracious and ungrateful to point 
out a withered leaf in the laurels of so great a poet, 
but we cannot help regretting that he was so much 
of a courtier, and that he had less of that love for 
the quiet of rural beauty than that greatest of all 
English poets who succeeded him. His lavish 
praise of the “ bold Eliza,” who was rampant like a 
blood-thirsty lioness on the English throne, is a blot 
on his work. The poet of chivalry who could alle¬ 
gorically represent the murder of Mary Stuart in 


78 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


that division of the “Faerie Queene ” called “Jus¬ 
tice,” must have lacked some of the qualities of true 
chivalry. Sliakspere, too, lived under the rule of 
Queen Elizabeth, who reigned because her father’s 
true wife, Katharine of Aragon, had been driven 
forth from her rightful place; still, we find this 
meek, yet stately Katharine, made one of the most 
noble figures in all the poet’s plays. Even, as some 
critics assert, if Henry VIII. were the last of 
Shakspere’s dramas and written in the reign of 
James I., the successor of Elizabeth, the high soul 
of the poet is none the less evident. 

83. The Play of “Henry VIII.” — It has been re¬ 
marked by many critics that the play of Henry 
VIII., in spite of some of the noblest writing possi¬ 
ble to any man, is weak dramatically. Lord Tp. nn y- 
son acutely pointed out the reason of this. Henry 
VIII. was written by two different hands. It has 
been settled beyond question that the incongruous 
and joyous fifth act was written by Fletcher. In 
this act, King Henry, notwithstanding the awful 
iniquity of his treatment of Queen Katharine, is 
promised future happiness in a mock-marriage with 
Anne Boleyn. All that is great and noble and 
pathetic in the play is Shakspere’s; the rest is by a 
more ignoble hand. 

We find no flings at the Catholic Church, or the 
Pope, made to please Queen Elizabeth or King 
James. Cardinal Wolsey, in his fall, is a dignified 


SHAKSPERE 


79 


figure, and Katharine, true to nature, a superbly 
noble one. Having read Shakspere’s plays and 
taken into consideration the circumstances of the 
time — at once so splendid and so mean — when 
Catholics were persecuted to death with horrible 
cruelties, one can hardly help thinking that Wil¬ 
liam Shakspere must have been in his heart of that 
ancient and proscribed Faith. It seems to have 
inspired him when he was at his best. How easy 
it would have been for him to have cast jibes at 
those Jesuits, like Southwell, who suffered death by 
command of this “ great Elizabeth,” or have pleased 
the tyrant by belying the character of her victim, 
Mary Stuart! Easy ? No; on second thoughts, it 
would have been impossible, for William Shakspere 
was the truest and most tender-hearted gentleman 
and the greatest genius that England ever pro¬ 
duced. 

84. The Historical Data.— Let us go back to the 
year 1571. Mary Stuart pined in her prison be¬ 
tween hope and fear. Elizabeth had done her best 
to extirpate every drop of Catholic blood from Eng¬ 
lish soil, and Pius V., less clement than his prede¬ 
cessor on the Papal throne, had excommunicated the 
queen. The air of England throbbed with rumors 
of deeds of blood, with prophecies of strange things 
to come. And yet there were nooks in that country 
where peace dwelt. The town of Stratford-upon- 
Avon, nestling among elms, oaks, and chestnuts, in 


80 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Warwickshire, “the garden spot of England,” lay as 
it lies to-day. The sod around it is velvet; the 
Avon sweeps to the Severn, casting back the sunlight 
as it goes; and so it flowed in 1571, when Will 
Shakspere, hazel-eyed and auburn-haired, leaned 
over his Latin Grammar in the schoolhouse at 
Stratford. He was a very small boy then,— only 
seven years of age,— but boys began to study Latin 
early. The school-room had been the Chapel of the 
Holy Cross for nearly three hundred years until 
Henry VIII. defaced it; nevertheless, the boy’s 
eyes rested on a series of rude paintings on the wall 
representing the origin of the cross and its history, 
ending with its exaltation at Jerusalem. Knowing 
this, can we wonder that Shakspere in after life was 
always reverent and Christian ? 

In As You Like It, he makes Jaques describe 

“ ... the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, 

And shining morning face, creeping like snail 
Unwillingly to school; ” 

and we may be sure that young Will, with all the 
beauty of his father’s orchards and meadows and all 
the sports of boys to tempt him, did not hasten 
willingly to school. And when he went a schoolboy 
from his books, it was to his father’s cottage, which 
stands yet. It is a little two-story house, with 
dormer windows in the roof. Its great oak beams 
and plastered walls are much the same as they were 
when little Will ran home to beg some comfits of 


SHAKSPERE 


81 


his mother, or to tell of the day’s woes. Here in 
the low-ceiled, flag-floored room, in a seat within 
the huge fireplace, the boy sat of winter nights and 
roasted the chestnuts he had gathered during his 
precious leisure time, while the crab-apples simmered 
in the bowl. He himself sings of the winter 
evenings: — 

“ When icicles hang by the wall, 

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, 

And Tom bears logs into the hall 
And milk comes frozen home in pail, 

When blood is nipped and ways be foul, 

Then nightly sings the staring owl.” 

In the summer the days of the boy at Stratford 
were glorious, despite the strict parental discipline 
then in vogue. We can imagine the auburn-haired 
little fellow, with humorous but grave eyes, standing 
on the rush-strewn floor and demurely waiting on 
his parents as they sat at table. The table had, 
perhaps, a “ carpet,” as they called a cloth, — for 
carpets were not put on the floors even of the 
queen’s palace in 1571,—and it was a good boy’s 
business to lay it. 

85. Shakspere in Summer.— In the spring and 
summer he absorbed all that beauty which he gave 
out later in his plays, in pictures of flowers and 
the seasons, such as no poet before or after him 
could have done. The boards in the floor of his 
father’s cottage are white to-day and worn, and the 
6 


82 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


nails in them have heads like polished silver; but 
the same flowers that bloomed around Stratford in 
the spring and the summer of 1571 bloomed and 
withered in the summer and autumn of this year. 

The peas-blossom nodded and the honeysuckle 
wafted its perfume; the bees and swallows, and the 
same shrill corn-crake that made the little Will for¬ 
get his declensions and shy a stone at it, revelled in 
the sun of 1891. The Avon swells among its tan¬ 
gles of wild-flowers and reeds, and broods of duck¬ 
lings hide among the wild thyme of the banks, and 
swim on its serene surface. The white chestnut 
blooms fall; the crimson roses flame in the old gar¬ 
den. Across the fields towards the little house of 
the Hathaways, where Shakspere’s wife lived, the 
glowing poppies make trails of fire among the soft, 
velvety green. In these fields Will played prisoner’s 
base with his brothers, Richard, Gilbert, and Ed¬ 
mund. Here he saw the picture he paints in Mid¬ 
summer-Night's Dream , where he makes Oberon say: 

** I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 

Where ox lips and the nodding violet grows ; 

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, 

With sw r eet musk-roses and with eglantine.” 

In the spring, he found by the Avon Ophelia’s 
flowers, those which in her gentle madness, after 
Hamlet has killed her father, she offers to the court. 

“ There’s fennel for you and columbines ; there’s 
rue for you, and here’s some for me: we may call it 


SHAKSPERE 


83 


herb-grace o’ Sundays. . . . There’s a daisy; I would 
give you some violets , but they withered all when my 
father died. They say he made a good end ” And in 
the spring, by his own Avon, too, the flowers he 
weaves into the Queen’s speech when she tells how 
the crazed Ophelia died: — 

“ There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; 

There, with fantastic garlands, did she come, 

Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples ; 

There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds 
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke, 

When down her weedy trophies and herself 

Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, 

And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: 

Which time, she chanted snatches of old tunes, 

As one incapable of her own distress, 

Or like a creature native and indu’ed 
Unto that element; but long it could not be, 

Till that her garments heavy with their drink 
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay 
To muddy death.” 

By the Avon’s banks in the early spring this 
exquisite glimpse was photographed in colors by 
his eye, and afterwards reproduced in Winter's Tale: 

“ . . . daffodils 

That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets, dim, 

But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes 
Or Cytherea’s breath ; pale primroses 
. . . bold ox-lips and 
The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, 

The flower-du-luce being one.” 


84 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Now when you visit Stratford you may get all 
the flowers mentioned by Ophelia fastened to a 
sheet of paper, even the violet that “ withered when 
her father died.” You may also get a strip of paper 
with the famous inscription marked in black on 
it — that famous inscription which has saved Shak¬ 
spere’s tomb from desecration. The guide will go 
down on his knees and trace it for you in the quaint 
old form: 

“ Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear 
To dig the dust enclosed here, 

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, 

And cursed be he that moves my bones.” 

86. Shakspere’s Education. — Shakspere’s father 
was anxious that his children should be educated 
well; and so for seven years the boy was kept at 
the Grammar school, which the religious-minded 
men of the Catholic time had founded and kept 
alive. By the time he left school his father had 
become poor. He went into some business or 
other, — perhaps he was a lawyer’s clerk, no one 
knows. His father, John Shakspere, did the best 
he could for his eldest son, and if Will had “ small 
Latin and less Greek,” he had enough to teach his 
younger brothers all they needed; this he probably 
did. Mr. Kegan Paul says: 

“It is certain that in the years during which he was 
at school and in his father’s business, he read not many 


SHAKSPERE 


85 


books, but much; and he learned that which ought to be 
the aim of all boyish education, not to cram the memory 
with facts and figures, but how to use all that comes to us 
in life.” 

There is a story that he shot one of Sir Thomas 
Lucy’s deer and was punished for poaching. Chari e- 
cot, Sir Thomas Lucy’s place, is about three miles 
from Stratford. The house in which the indignant 
owner of the deer lived still stands; you approach it 
through paths bordered with hawthorn, blush roses, 
beeches, and elms, and over turf soft because a thou¬ 
sand years have rolled over it. In As You Like 
It, Shakspere describes the English forest of 
Arden — from which his mother, Mary Arden, prob¬ 
ably took her name — which is really No Man’s 
Land, for there they “ fleet their time carelessly, as 
they did in the golden world,” and though the forest 
is supposed to be in France — that of Ardennes — 
lions and palm trees lived in it. This comedy is the 
most lyrical drama ever written. In this strange 
forest the “melancholy Jaques,” supposed to typ¬ 
ify Shakspere himself, sees a deer,— 

“ ... as he lay along 
Under an oak whose antique root peeps out 
Upon the brook that brawls along this wood; 

To which place a poor, sequestered stag. 

That from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt. 

Did come to languish ; and indeed, my lord, 

The writhed animal heav’d forth such groans 


86 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat 
Almost to bursting ; and the big round tears 
Coursed one another down his innocent nose 
In piteous chase: and thus the hairy fool, 

Much marked of the melancholy Jaques, 

Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook.” 

87. Shakspere’s Son Hamnet or Hamlet. — Whether 
Shakspere killed Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer or not, he 
had seen a wounded deer and he knew how to make 
the world see it with his eyes — a supreme gift in a 
writer. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, whose 
cottage still stands about a mile from Stratford. In 
this little house, to which ivy and running roses 
cling, they probably lived with their children, Susan¬ 
na, who married Dr. Hall, and the twins, Hamnet 
and Judith. Hamnet died young, and Judith, about 
whom William Black has written a charming story, 
called Judith Shakspere , became Mrs. Quiney. No 
descendant of Shakspere bearing his name is now 
alive. 

Things went badly at Stratford. He had not yet 
learned to coin the sobs of the stricken deer or the 
scent of the musk-roses into money. He went to 
London, bidding his wife and children be hopeful in 
the rural nest at Stratford. And there he found 
success. It is said that he took in his pocket his 
first poem, and that this attracted the attention of 
Lord Southampton and Lord Pembroke, two of the 
most brilliant of Elizabeth’s courtiers. 


SHAKSPERE 


87 


We cannot know what books Shakspere read in 
order to prepare himself to meet and dazzle the wits 
of this witty time, for the only volume of his that 
has come down to us is a translation of the French 
essayist Montaigne, of whose influence one can find 
traces in his plays. We know he had read the 
Scripture, and that he found 

“ . . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything. ” 

In London, which was not then the great city it is 
now, the young rustic saw much to amuse him. 
How he became an actor, we do not know. It is 
said that he performed in his own plays —the part 
of Adam, for instance, in As You Like It. One 
thing is sure: he loved his family, and returned to 
Stratford at stated intervals with his heart set on 
rescuing his old father from poverty and of making 
his wife and children comfortable. He longed for 
the time when he could settle down among the 
primrose fields and blooming orchards of his native 
place, and leave the glitter of the court and city and 
the glare of the play-house to others. Shakspere did 
not seek for fame, or for money as money; he made 
his marvellous dramas for the great end that he 
might make his father happy and his children 
happy — that he might, at the end, live pleasantly 
and peacefully among the scenes which he knew and 
loved as a boy. He “ builded better than he knew.” 
He was so careless as to the printing of his noble 


88 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


works that, had it not been for the care of two of 
his fellow-actors, the greatest of these great plays 
Avould have been lost to us. In 1623 — seven years 
after his death — the first folio edition of his plays was 
issued by Heminges and Condell. If they had been 
less solicitous for his fame, it would have died with 
him. 

88. Spenser Praises Shakspere. —Shakspere was 
early recognized as a poet. Spenser praised him; 
he was king among the wits, a star among the no¬ 
bles. Ben Jonson, the most learned among his 
contemporaries, hailed him when living and extolled 
him when dead. Success and wealth came. But 
all the while Shakspere was thinking of Stratford- 
upon-Avon’ In those days every gentleman had a 
coat of arms. Shakspere revived the arms of his 
family during his father’s lifetime; they were, in 
heraldic language, a pointed spear on a bend sable 
and a silver falcon on a tasselled helmet, supporting 
a spear. An allusion to this bearing of arms occurs 
in the grave-digging scene of Hamlet. The second 
grave-digger asks if Adam was a gentleman. 

“ First Clown. . . . the first that ever bore arms. 

Second Clown. Why, he had none. 

First Clown. What, art a heathen? The Scripture 
says, Adam digged; could he dig without arms? ” 

In London, Shakspere met Marlowe, who, if he 
had not died early, would have more nearly ap- 


SHAKSPERE 


89 


proached our master than any other. Richard III. 
shows the influence of Marlowe, and parts of Henry 
VI. were written by him. Shakspere laughed at 
the fashions of the day — the absurd costumes of the 
men and the euphuistic affectations of their speech— 
as satirically as Hamlet laughs at Osric, the “ dude,” 
in that great drama of thought. He never fails to 
fling at women’s false hair and face-paintings, and 
the tyrannies of the ladies’ tailors. Autolycus’ song, 
in Winter's Tale, shows that he knew the needs 
of the ladies of 1611 or thereabouts : — 

“ Lawn as white as driven snow, 

Cyprus 1 black as e’er was crow, 

Glove as sweet as damask roses, 

Masks for faces and for noses, 

Bugle, bracelet, necklace-amber, 

Perfume for a lady’s chamber.” 

89. Shakspere’s Later Life.— What little we 
know of Shakspere’s later life we must gather from 
his plays, for there is no other record. His first 
farce was probably The Comedy of Errors. It is 
a huge joke. Then came Midsummer-Night's 
Dream, a fantasy of moonlight, spiders’ webs with 
dew upon them, flowers, fairies, and queer monsters, 
all seen in the atmosphere of a poet’s dream. After 
these, Love's Labour Won, recast as All's Well 
That Ends Well, and the Italian stories, The Two 
Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. 

1 Crape. 


90 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


From these we gather that Will Shakspere was gen¬ 
erous, impetuous, gay, with a tear for suffering and 
a heart full of affection, and, like his heroes withal, 
fond of a practical jest. His first period ended 
with King John, in which one of the few children 
drawn by Shakspere is so pathetically presented in 
Prince Arthur. In 1596, he entered his second 
period, with the most perfect of all his comedies, 
The Merchant of Venice. He had reached the 
prime of his manhood. Here we have a high type 
of womanhood in Portia, feminine, yet almost more 
than a woman in her desire to save her husband’s 
friend, and Shy lock, the Jew, in whom the best 
attributes of a great race have been turned to evil 
by the un-Christian persecution of Christians — 
the generous Antonio, the graceful Bassanio, and 
the beautiful, but ungrateful Jessica. Then came the 
Taming of the Shrew, an old farce retouched; the 
three plays in which Sir John Falstaff appears,— 
the two parts of Henry IV. and The Merry Wives 
of Windsor; and the splendid historical pageant 
of Henry V. The comedies he wrote for the Globe 
Theatre, in which he had a share, sparkle with gaiety 
and the lighter poetry: Much Ado About Nothing, 
with the saucy Beatrice; As You Like It, with the 
brilliant Rosalind and the “ melancholy Jaques,” 
who was a precursor in sadness of the deep de¬ 
spondency of Hamlet; then Twelfth Night, and 
All’s Well That Ends Well In 1602, Shakspere 


SHAKSPERE 


91 


had got his wish, as the children say, and it was 
moderate enough. At the age of forty-three — about 
the age at which Milton was struck by blindness, 
with his life-work hardly begun, — he was rich and 
honored. But shadows fell upon him. Hamnet, 
his son, was dead; there would be none of his name 
to bear the coat of arms he had so eagerly desired. 
This was not the worst; he had been betrayed by 
some friend whom he had trusted — as we see by the 
mysterious sonnets, which are as hard to read as the 
riddle of the Sphinx and as fraught with meaning. 
Some day we may find that they had a religious 
significance, and that the poet puts yearnings and 
hopes into them which he dare not utter more plainly. 

90. The Loved Friends.— His great and noble 
friends were beheaded or exiled. Avarice and all 
evil passions ruled the court; “ the time was out of 
joint,” and the poet, like Hamlet, could not put it 
right. He becomes more gloomy; no more light 
comedies, only the darkest tragedies. Julius Coe - 
sar, written in 1601, means his grief for the ruin 
of his friends. Then follow Hamlet , expressing 
crime and the vanity of trying to escape its pun¬ 
ishment; Othello , jealousy and murder; Macbeth , 
inordinate ambition; Lear, horrible ingratitude; 
Antony and Cleopatra , Coriolanus, and Timon . 
Later, the Tempest , Cymbeline, and Winter's Tale, 
in which the flowers of Stratford bloom again, 
and we feel that the bruised heart has found 


92 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


rest in country sights and sounds. Last of all, he 
wrote with Fletcher the nobler parts of Henry 
VIII., in 1612. Later writers made his sketch 
of Marina into the play of Pericles. He lived 
among his flowers and books, tended by his favorite 
daughter Judith, at his house, New Place, in Strat¬ 
ford, until peace came to him on May 3, 1616. He 
passed from earth in the fifty-second year of his age, 
having made an epoch in the world. 

91. His Religion. — Tradition says that Shakspere 
was ever gentle to those of the persecuted Faith of 
his fathers; 1 and his plays show it. New Place, at 
Stratford, is no more, only the foundations remain. 
Puritanism destroyed all that Henry VIII.’s brutal¬ 
ity had left, or perhaps we should know more of 
this gentle man. His daughter, Judith Quiney, 
became a Puritan, and in her desire to eradicate all 
vestiges of the play-acting of her beloved father, she 
doubtless destroyed many traces of his thoughts and 
acts which we would now dwell on with love. If 
we can take the testimony of the personages he cre¬ 
ated whenever they were in extremity, we must con¬ 
clude that he at least understood the religious 
beliefs his fathers had held. 

It is true that he wrote words that he ought to 
have blotted. Let us blot them out, and know them 
not. His nobility is so high that they, like plucked- 
up weeds, may perish in its shadow. 

1 Judith Sliakspere : William Black. 


SHAKSPERE 


93 


To read his works carefully, under competent 
direction, is an education. What has he not said ? 
Each reading brings out some new meaning. 

The most bigoted unbeliever must admit that 
Sliakspere was deeply Christian in belief. Rever¬ 
ence fills his plays like the breath of incense. Mr. 
Frederick Furnivall, one of the acutest of modern 
critics, reaches this conclusion heartily. Shak- 
spere declares his belief in the immortality of the 
soul — 

“ And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.” 

92. His belief in immortality. — His speech is “ sat¬ 
urated with the Scriptures.” How could he help it ? 
Had he not in the schoolroom gazed every day on 
the painted story of the Cross, and read everywhere, 
in spite of Henry VIII.’s barbarity, the symbolism 
of the Church which had filled the life of England 
before the Reformation with the beauty of God’s 
word? Though the statues of the saints were 
broken, and their figures in the stained-glass win¬ 
dows defaced, the Church of the Holy Trinity still 
pointed with its spire towards heaven. Even in 
Shakspere’s later time, all remembrance of the Sac¬ 
ramental Presence could not have faded out of Strat ¬ 
ford. We can imagine Shakspere walking in the 
gloaming towards this old church, with its Gothic 
windows and fretted battlements. The glow-worms 
waver near him as he comes through the avenue of 
green lime trees, near the beech- and yew-shaded 


94 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


graveyard. He has come by the shining Avon, from 
“the lonesome meadows beyond where th® primroses 
stand in their golden banks among the clover, and 
the frilled and fluted bell of the cowslip, hiding its 
single drop of blood, closes its petals as the night 
comes down.” 1 He pauses in the nave of the church, 
and there in the soft glow, cast by the last shaft of 
glory from the setting sun, he sees the vacant place 
where, his father has told him, the tabernacle had 
been. It is gone. Perchance an old woman, who 
had seen the Faith in its glory, lies prostrate, sob¬ 
bing before the despoiled altar whence her God has 
been torn. And then he murmurs, with his own 
dying Queen Katharine : — 

“ Spirits of peace, where are you? Are ye all gone 
And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye ? ” 

93. His Death. — And, folding his hands at his 
back, he passes back through that sweet-scented 
lane, whose blossoms shall fall on his own coffln ere 
long. His eyes are soft and hazel; his cheeks are 
not so ruddy as when he laid the cloth for his father 
and mother in earlier days; his. forehead is dome¬ 
like ; he wears his customary suit of scarlet and 
black; so he goes to New Place, for which he has 
so long worked, to the demure Judith who waits for 
him, to his little chubby-cheeked grandchild, Bess 
Hall. The antlers in the entry, the silver tankards 


1 William Winter. 


SIIAKSPERE 


95 


on the side-board, of which his wife and Judith are 
so proud, show dimly in the falling night; he mur¬ 
murs the new song he has lately made for his play 
of Cymbeline: 

“ Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, 

Nor the furious winter’s rages; 

Thou thy worldly task hast done, 

Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.” 

A swan glides slowly to her nest among the reeds 
of the Avon. “ The crimson drops i’ the bottom of 
the cowslip ” 1 are now quite hid from the sight of 
the swallow that westward flies across the meadows. 
William Shakspere, whom God gifted so gloriously, 
passes with the sadness of the gloaming in his soul. 
“ And the rest is silence.” 


1 Cymbeline. 


CHAPTER IX 


Minor Dramatists and Ben Jonson. The Lyrists. 

1596 - 1654 . 

94. It would be a mistake to imagine that the Eng¬ 
lish people of the reigns of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, 
and King Charles II., were all Protestants in the 
modern sense. Lodge, Southwell, Constable, Shirley, 
Crashaw, and Habington, were Catholic writers, popu¬ 
lar with Englishmen. The final revolt against the 
Church was due to the ill-advised and bigoted policy 
of James II. It was political. 

95. Ben Jonson wavered between the Church and 
Protestantism and finally accepted the latter, argu¬ 
ing that he was a good Protestant because he drank 
all the wine he could during the ceremony of the 
“ Lord’s Supper.” This expression will probably 
give you the key to the personal character of the 
man. He had genius; he was rough, swaggering, 
even brutal, a scholar and sometimes a cynic; he 
admired his great contemporary, Shakspere, though 
they were widely different. Jonson had great stores 
of learning, and Shakspere had never been a stu- 


MINOR DRAMATISTS 


97 


dent, except of men and nature. Jonson’s genius 
seems like talent when compared with Shakspere’s. 
Jonson’s dramas, great as they are, mark the begin¬ 
ning of the decline of dramatic art in England. 
He was horn in 1573, and was educated at West¬ 
minster School, and, according to some authorities, 
at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Jonson rejoiced 
in putting action before words, and his plays conse¬ 
quently lack the exquisite diction of Shakspere’s in 
which the action is suited to the word and the word 
to the action. His dramatic characters are named 
for their intentions or actions; he does not trust 
them to show what they are. Morose is, for 
instance, the name of a man in Epiccene, or The 
Silent Woman ; Cutbeard is the name of a barber in 
the same play, and Subtle that of the hero of The 
Alchemist. Jonson was thrown into prison for hav¬ 
ing killed a man in a duel. While in prison he 
became a Catholic, and was evidently sincere. His 
subsequent reversion to the Anglican Church was 
probably the result of carelessness and the difficulty 
of practising his adopted religion at a time when to 
be a Catholic was to be a criminal in the eyes of the 
law. Sejanus , his first play, appeared in 1603. 
Every Man in his Humour was played in 1596-98. 
This comedy was followed by Every Man out of his 
Humour; Cynthia's Revels; and, in James I.’s reign, 
Volpone , or The Fox; The Silent Woman; The 
Alchemist; and, after an interval, Catiline, a tragedy. 

7 


98 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


In 1619 he was made poet laureate. He died in 
1637. His last play, The Sad Shepherd, is his 
sweetest. Jonson’s masques — lyrical plays very 
much in vogue at court during the reigns of Eliza¬ 
beth and James I. — show that he had the finest 
poetic feeling, in addition to his learning, for which 
he is always praised. There is a description of one 
of his masques in Sir Walter Scott’s novel of Kenil¬ 
worth. Jonson wrote few songs. The best of them 
is paraphrased from the Latin and occurs in Epi- 
coene, or The Silent Woman. It begins: — 

“ Still to be neat, still to be drest. 

As you were going to a feast; 

Still to be powdered, still perfumed ; 

Lady, it is to be presumed. 

Though Art’s bid causes are not found, 

All is not sweet, all is not sound. ” 

During the last years of his life he was acknowl¬ 
edged as the greatest man of letters in England. 
He died in London, August 6, 1637. Collections of 
his epistles and lyrics were made under the general 
names of the Underwoods and The Forest. Ben Jon¬ 
son’s poem to Shakspere was prefixed to the first 
folio-edition of Shakspere’s works, printed in 1623. 
In it, he calls the great poet — 

“ Soul of the age ! 

The applause, the delight, the wonder of our stage.” 

96. Beaumont and Fletcher. — John Fletcher, born 
at Rye, Sussex, in December, 1579, and Francis 


MINOR DRAMATISTS 


99 


Beaumont, born about 1584, wrote some plays 
remarkable for their power. Philaster and The 
Maid's Tragedy are the most remarkable. Fletcher 
wrote a charming lyrical poem, The Faithful Shep¬ 
herdess. The Two Noble Kinsmen is said to have 
been written by Shakspere and Fletcher. It is 
impossible to tell what part Beaumont or Fletcher 
contributed to the joint plays. They wrote exqui¬ 
site lyrics. It is regrettable that their dramas are 
too coarse to be read with enjoyment in our times. 
Although they wrote fine poetry now and then, they 
were untrue to human nature. Beaumont died in 
1616, Fletcher in 1625. 

97. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, John Webster, 
George Chapman, John Marston, Henry Clapthorne, 
Richard Browne, William Rowley, Thomas Middle- 
ton, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Hey wood, and James 
Shirley, came after Massinger and Ford. 

98. James Shirley, though a boy when Elizabeth 
died, was the last of the glorious band of dramatists 
associated with her name and reign. He was born 
at London in 1596, and was educated at the Mer¬ 
chant-Tailors’ School and at St. John’s College, 
Oxford; from St. John’s he went to Cambridge 
received orders and got a cure near St. Albans 
which he gave up, from religious convictions, and 
embraced the Catholic faith. We next find Shirley 
as a dramatist in London, smiled on by fortune and 
flie court, in the person of Charles I.’s Queen, who 
L.ofC. 


100 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


admired his genius and his Catholicity. In 1637 he 
crossed to Ireland, and wrote some plays which were 
performed at the first theatre ever erected in Dublin. 
On his return he took part in the civil war, fighting, 
of course, on the side of the King, and in his later 
life he gave up dramatizing and taught school. 
Shirley was a man of upright and irreproachable 
character and a devout Catholic. 

His first play was a comedy entitled Love's Tricks 
(1625). From this period till 1641, his dramas fol¬ 
lowed in rapid succession. In 1646 he published a 
volume of love poems, and two small volumes of 
masques in 1653 and 1659. Shirley’s verse while 
not markedly original, is elegant and forceful and 
has the true Elizabethan ring. He died in 1666. 

99. Ford and Massinger, Webster and Chapman, 
who made the fine translation of Homer immortalized 
in Keats’ fine sonnet, were dark and impassioned in 
tragedy, but they lacked naturalness. 

Massinger’s first play was The Virgin Martyr , dated 
1620. His best known drama is The New Way to 
Pay Old Debts , which centres on the character of Sir 
Giles Overreach. Massinger died in 1640. He is 
truer to humanity than Beaumont or Fletcher; his 
language is unhappily often indecent; but he under¬ 
stood that the highest thing on earth is a good man 
or woman’s remaining true to God in spite of all obsta¬ 
cles. John Ford published The Lover's Melancholy , 
hr 1629, and Perkin Warbcck , which has been pro- 


MINOR DRAMATISTS 


101 


nounced to be the best historic drama since -Shak- 
spere. The Broken Heart is a drama of horrors. 
John Webster, too, revelled in horrors and ghast¬ 
liness. His most important play was The Duchess 
of Malfi, acted in 1616; Vittoria Corombona (1612) 
was followed by The Devil's Law Case , Appius 
and Virginia, and the comedies Westward IIo l 
and Northward Ho ! In these he was assisted by 
Dekker. 

100. Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639), whose 
memoir was written by that genial-souled angler 
Izaak Walton, wrote two poems, viz.: The Char¬ 
acter of a Happy Life (1614), and the lines On His 
Mistress the Queen of Bohemia (1620), which have 
secured a permanent place in English literature. 

101. Thomas Carew (1598-1639) is the first in 
time, the second in genius, of that band of Royalist 
lyrists who graced the first quarter of the seventeenth 
century. Herrick alone surpasses Carew in the deli¬ 
cacy and subtle charm of his lyrics, and Carew has 
the added merit of being the inventor of that courtly 
amorous poetry which characterized the reign of 
Charles I. and his successor. His best poem, The 
Rapture, is unhappily disfigured by the loose moral 
tone of his age, and cannot be laid before the general 
reader; but most of his lyrics are freshly and purely 
conceived. Carew, Edmund Gosse well says, “ is a 
transitional figure; he holds Shakspere with one 
hand and Congreve with the other, and leads us 


102 


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down the hill of the seventeenth century by a path 
more flowery and of easier incline than any of his 
compeers; yet we must never forget, in considering 
his historical position, that his chief merit lies, after 
all, in his fresh coloring and sincere passion.” 

102. Robert Herrick was born in Cheapside, in 
August, 1591, and died at Dean-Prior, October 15, 
1674. In 1648, he published Hesperides. Herrick, 
like Horace, may be said to have lived an ideal life 
for a poet; his twenty years of Arcadian repose in 
Dean-Priory, Devonshire, were preceded by an even 
more cultured seclusion of fourteen years. He is 
the first of the English pastoral poets, and in the front 
rank of the lyrists, and in the twelve hundred songs 
and lyrics that remain to us we gather the rich fruit 
of this retirement. The average merit of Herrick’s 
verse is very high, and in such lyrics as To Blossoms 
and To Daffodils he has produced gems which will 
not pale in comparison with anything of the kind in 
the whole range of literature. 

103. George Sandys (1577-1644) wrote a fine 
translation of Ovid (1626), which has the unique 
distinction of having been the first English poem 
written on the American continent, whither Sandys 
had come as secretary. (Vide Hist. Amer. Lit. by 
Moses Coit Tyler, vol. i.) 

104. George Herbert (1593-1633) was public ora¬ 
tor at Cambridge and afterward rector of Bemer- 
ton in Wiltshire. He wrote the Temple (1631), the 


THE LYRISTS 


103 


purity and devotion of the poems contained in .which 
have earned for it a lasting reputation. With Her¬ 
bert is usually associated his disciple, Henry Vaughan 
(1621-1695), whose poems breathe the same spirit 
of quaint unworldly mysticism. 

105. Thomas Randolph (1605-1634), who died at 
the early age of thirty, gave much promise as a poet. 
His drama, The Jealous Lovers , was printed in 1632; 
his other works appearing posthumously. He had 
much of the Elizabethan vigor in his best passages, 
and his Cotswold Eclogue ranks justly high among 
English pastoral poems. Abraham Cowley (1618- 
1667) is another poet of this period. He is best 
known by A Wish. 

106. Thomas Lodge (1558-1625) was the son 

of Sir Thomas Lodge, one of London’s lord mayors, 
and a Catholic. Lodge studied at Oxford and then 
went to Avignon, where he was graduated doctor of 
medicine. In London on his return he became a suc¬ 
cessful dramatist and poet, and a popular physician. 
His works include novels, pamphlets, sonnets, 
elegies and some plays. His first play was entitled: 
The Wounds of Civil War lively set forth in the 
Tragedies of Marius and Sylla (1591), and was pub¬ 
lished in 1594. In partnership with Robert Greene 
he wrote A Looking-glass for London and England. 
His other important works are: Rosalynde Euphues’ 
Golden Legacy (1590), Phyllis (1593), and A 
Margarite of America (1596). Thomas Lodge died 


104 


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of the plague at Low Leyton, in Essex, in 1625. “ In 

some respects,” says Mr. Edmund Gosse, “ Lodge is 
superior to most of the lyrical poets of his time. He 
is certainly the best of the Euphuists, and no one 
rivalled him in the creation of a dreamy scene, * out 
of space, out of time/ where the loves and the 
jousts of an ideal chivalry would be pleasantly 
tempered by tending of sheep.” This is high praise, 
and nobly does Lodge deserve it. It will be re¬ 
membered how much Lodge’s Rosalynde colored 
Shakspere’s treatment of his charming comedy As 
You Like It. 

107. Henry Constable was born about 1562, of a 
good Catholic family and was graduated at Cam¬ 
bridge University when he was twenty-four years 
old. He was suspected, on account of his religion, 
of a treasonable correspondence with France, and 
quitted England in 1595. On his return, some six 
years later, he was apprehended and committed to 
the Tower, where he was confined till towards the 
end of 1604. The date of Constable’s death is not 
accurately known, but it was probably about 1613. 

In 1592, he published a sonnet-sequence entitled, 
Diana; or the praises of his Mistress in certaine 
sweete sonnets, and also some spiritual sonnets. 
Constable’s sonnets are occasionally sweet, but too 
full, as was the fashion of his time, of conceits which 
are ingenious rather than poetical. The following 
sonnet is typical of his work : — 


THE LYRISTS 


105 


(Sonnet prefixed to Sidney's Apology for Poetry, 1595 .) 

Give pardon, blessed soul, to my bold cries, 

If they, importuned, interrupt thy song, 

Which now with joyful notes thou sing’st among 
The angel quiristers of the heavenly skies. 

Give pardon eke, sweet soul ! to my slow cries, 

That since I saw thee now it is so long; 

And yet the tears that unto thee belong, 

To thee as yet they did not sacrifice; 

I did not know that thou wert dead before, 

I did not feel the grief I did sustain; 

The greater stroke astonisheth the more, 

Astonishment takes from us sense of pain: 

I stood amazed when others’ tears begun: 

And now begin to weep when they have done. 

108. Sir John Suckling was born at Twickenham 
in 1609, and committed suicide in Paris in 1642. 
He wrote the drama of Aglaura (1638); the ballad 
Of a Wedding (1640); and Fragmcnta Aurea y all 
his remaining works, were published posthumously. 
Suckling’s life, as became his wealth and station, was 
more that of a man of the world than of a poet. His 
public career was stirring and adventurous to the 
last degree, and yet there are songs in his Golden 
Fragments which will keep his name fresh in the 
hearts of all true lovers of poetry. 

109. Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) published 
Lucasta (1649) and Posthume Poems (1659). Love¬ 
lace was the most careless and unequal poet of an 
age of such writers. He will always be remembered 
as the author of that noble farewell, On Going to the 
Wars, in which occur the two golden lines: 


106 


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“ I could not love thee, dear, so much, 

Loved I not honor more.” 

110. William Browne (1591-1643) wrote Brit - 
annia's Pastoral and Shepherd's Pipe. He was one 
of that knot of brilliant young men who called them¬ 
selves the sons of Ben Jonson, and was addressed 
by Chapman as the learned Shepherd of Eair Hitch¬ 
ing Hill. His pastoral poetry is sweet and natural. 

111. George Wither (1588-1667) is generally 
known as the author of one charming lyric: — 

“ Shall I, wasting in despaire , 1 
Dye because a woman’s faire ? 

Or make pale my cheeks with care 
’ Cause another’s rosie are ? ” 

It is published at the end of the first edition of 
Fidelia ) a poetical epistle from a girl to her incon¬ 
stant lover, but the writer of the Shepherd's Hunting 
—whose muse, according to Charles Lamb, “is dis¬ 
tinguished by a hearty homeliness of manner and a 
plain moral speaking ”— deserves to be better known. 
He was an intimate friend of Browne’s and the two 
wrote in friendly rivalry. Wither’s works, both in 
prose and poetry, are voluminous. “ The prison notes 
of Wither,” says the critic already quoted, in refer¬ 
ence to The Shepherd's PLunting, written during the 
author’s confinement in the Marshalsea, “ are better 
than the wood notes of most of his brethren.” 


1 Old spelling. 


THE LYRISTS 


107 


112. Giles Fletcher (1588?-1623), cousin of one 
of the authors of The Two Noble Kinsmen , wrote 
a religious poem of some merit, entitled, Christ's 
Victory in Heaven ancl Earth over and after Death 
(1640). It is written in the Spenserian stanza. 

113. Richard Crashaw (1613-1649). Pope did not 
hesitate to borrow the finest passages in Eloise 
and Abelard from Crashaw, and there are many 
lines hi Crashaw’s poems which unite the per¬ 
fect finish of Pope to a spontaneity and poetic 
warmth which the Great Classic never attained. 
Crashaw was born in an “ intellectual day,” tempered 
by a dim religious light. His father, like Habing- 
ton’s, was an author, a preacher in the Temple Church, 
London, near which the poet was born. He took 
his degree at Cambridge. He entered the Anglican 
Church as a minister. But his views were not “ ortho¬ 
dox ; ” he was expelled from his living, and soon after 
he became a Catholic. From his poems it is plain 
that Crashaw was always a Catholic at heart. He 
went into the Church as one who, having lived in 
a half-forgotten place in dreams, enters it without 
surprise. Crashaw went to Court, but gained no 
preferment. The “ not impossible she ” he speaks of 
in Wishes , whose courtly opposites suggested the 
portrait, never “ materialized ” herself. He became 
a priest, and died in 1650, canon of Loretto — an 
office which he obtained, it is said, through the influ¬ 
ence of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. Crashaw’s 


108 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


poems are better known than Habington’s. The best 
known is Wishes, which, like Herrick’s To Daffo¬ 
dils, is quoted in almost every reader, and the love¬ 
ly poem beginning, — 

“ Lo! here a little volume but large book 
(Fear it not, sweet, 

It is no hypocrite), 

Much larger in itself than in its look.’ 

If Richard Crashaw, a poet who, by reason of his 
entire devotion to his faith and his absolute purity, 
belongs to this group, had written nothing except 
the finale of The Flaming Heart, he would de¬ 
serve more fame than at present distinguishes his 
name. The Flaming Heart, marred as it is by 
those exasperating conceits that Crashaw never 
seemed tired of indulging in, is full of the intense 
fervor which the subject, “ The picture of the seraphi- 
cal St. Teresa, as she is usually expressed with 
seraphim beside her,” would naturally suggest to a 
religious and poetic mind. Very justly this poem 
beautifully closes: — 

“ 0 thou undaunted daughter of desires! 

By all thy dower of lights and fires; 

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; 

By all thy lives and deaths of love ; 

By thy large draughts of intellectual day, 

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; 

By all thy brim-fiUM bowls of fierce desire, 

By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire, 

By the full kingdom of that final kiss 


THE LYRISTS 


109 


That seized tliy parting soul and sealed thee His; 

By all the Heav’n thou hast in Him, 

(Fair sister of the seraphim !) 

By all of Him we have in thee, 

Leave nothing of myself in me. 

Let me so read thy life that I 
Unto all life of mine may die.” 

114. William Habington (1605-1654) is remem¬ 
bered only by his poem to the lady whom he has 
sung under the fanciful name of Castara. Hab- 
ington was a devout Catholic, and his poems are filled 
with the spirit of purity. His description of Castara 
is exquisite: — 

“ Like the violet which alone 

Prospers in some happy shade, 

My Castara lives unknown 
To no looser eye betrayed ; 

For she’s to herself untrue 
Who delights i’ the public view. 

" Such is her beauty, as no arts 

Have enriched with borrowed grace, 

Her high birth no pride imparts, 

For she blushes in her place. 

Folly boasts a glorious blood; 

4 She is noblest being good.” 

Tranquil, serene, surrounded by his children and 
supported by a firm faith, of which The Holy Man , 
the fourth part of Castara, is an evidence, he ended 
a happy and peaceful life in 1654. 


CHAPTEE X 


Milton and Dryden. From 1608 to 1700. 

115. John Milton (1608-1674) is the one English 
poet who may be compared with the greatest of all 
epic poets, Dante. He is less than Dante, because 
he is not so true as Dante; he does not take advan¬ 
tage of the full glory of Christian doctrine and 
tradition in Paradise Lost; he shows more sympathy 
with Satan than with St. Michael; and his epic 
lacks the human interest and feeling found in the 
Divina Commedia of Dante. Milton felt that he 
was a poet, and he consciously looked about for a 
great subject. Shakspere, the greatest of all 
dramatic poets, had written from his heart, “ warbled 
his wood-notes wild; ” he probably chose the dramatic 
form without much reflection. But Milton, full of 
sublime thoughts, resolved to take the epic form 
and measure himself with Homer, Yirgil, and 
Dante. 

Milton looked for a subject on which he could 
embroider his grand images. Like the Saxon poet 
Ciedmon, the client of St. Hilda, he chose the story 


MILTON AND DRYDEN —1608-1700 111 

of the Fall of Man, as related in Genesis. This he 
called Paradise Lost. His Paradise Regained , a 
pendant to the first poem, is powerful, hut it has 
less interest and its diction is not so noble as the 
epic on which his fame rests. 

If Milton had never written Paradise Lost he 
would be illustrious for having produced two of 
the finest odes in our language, L’Allegro (The 
Cheerful Man), and LI Penseroso (The Thoughtful 
Man). 

116. John Milton was born in Bread Street, 
London, December 9, 1608. He was instructed 
at St. Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge. 
He was intended by his family for the Anglican 
Church. He had, however, imbibed prejudices 
against the divine right of kings, then upheld by 
the English Church. He went into retirement at 
his father’s country residence, Horton, in the county 
of Bucks. Here he devoted himself to hard study, 
as a preparation for the great task he proposed to 
undertake; he had resolved to be a poet of the first 
order. He held his vocation sacred; he knew that 
a poet, even of the highest genius, must study hard 
to make himself worthy of God’s gift. 

From 1632 to 1638 he wrote L’Allegro and 
LI Penseroso , representing contrasted moods in a 
scholar’s life, and Arcades , Comus , and Lycidas. 
The first two were written before the poet’s journey 
to Italy, when he had only begun to study the 


112 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Italian language. In 1638-39, he went to Italy to 
complete his education; he returned hastily, to enter 
into politics and political and religious controversies 
for twenty years. He accepted the post of Latin 
secretary to the Commonwealth, although, in 1649 
his eyes began to show signs of disease. In 1652 
he became blind. He thus describes his blindness: 

“ So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs, 

Or dim sufFusion veiled.” 

From these lines, it would appear that the poet 
did not know the cause of his blindness. It might 
have been, as Professor Mark Pattison says, either 
amaurosis (drop serene), or cataract (suffusion). 

He began Paradise Lost in 1657. During the 
twenty years’ interval he wrote some sonnets, which 
Wordsworth characterizes as — 

“ Soul-animating strains, alas, too few ! ” 

They were political or personal. One of his son¬ 
nets, written on his blindness at the age of fifty, 
ends with the famous line, so full of music and 
resignation: — 

“They also serve who only stand and wait.” 

117. Samson Agonistes is taken from the Scriptural 
account of the great slayer of the Philistines. It 
was Milton’s last great poem. It is imitated from 
the Greek drama with choruses. Milton, the un¬ 
conquered but defeated Puritan, doubtless saw in 
Samson an image of himself. Paradise Regained is 


MILTON AND DRYDEN — 1608-1700 113 


in a more dramatic form than Paradise Lost; the 
dramatic form of the Elizabethan time still lingers 
in it. It is the story of our Lord, told from the time 
of his baptism. It is inferior to Paradise Lost. In 
Paradise Lost — separated by twenty years from 
the delightful odes, L’Allegro, LI Penseroso, Lycidas, 
written on the death of a friend, and the masque of 
Comus, we find sublimity, the grandest poetic style 
ever written, and the most sonorous rhythm. It has 
only one defect. Milton did not see the full mean¬ 
ing and beauty of the Incarnation. He was not 
sufficiently Christian. Milton, like most Puritans, 
looked on women as inferior beings, although his 
description of Eve is fine; and, consequently, he 
could not conceive the character of her whom 
Wordsworth called — 

“ Our tainted nature’s solitary boast.” 

In 1665 Paradise Lost was completed. The great 
plague and the great fire prevented its publication; 
it did not appear until August, 1667. It was divided 
into ten books at first; later, Milton cut it into 
twelve, by subdividing the seventh and tenth books. 
During 1665-66, he wrote Paradise Regained and 
the magnificent Samson Agonistes. These poems 
appeared in 1671; he died in 1674. 

118. Milton’s Prose. Between 1640 and 1660 
Milton wrote most of his sonnets. They varied in 
tone, but they are nearer in form to those of Petrarca 
8 


114 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


than the sonnets of Sidney or Shakspere. Of his 
pamphlets written during this time, we may men¬ 
tion Areopagitica, or Speech for the Liberty of 
Unlicensed Printing, 1644; five pamphlets before 
1642; a tract on Education; four pamphlets in 
which he advocated polygamy, or unconditional di¬ 
vorce. He defended the beheading of Charles I. 
in 1649; in Latin he wrote a Defence of the People 
of England, 1651; he answered the Eikon Basilike, 
written in sympathy with Charles, by the Eikono - 
clastes, another Defence of the English People, 1654, 
and a Defence of Himself, in 1655; he later pub¬ 
lished other pamphlets of a political nature. He 
finished Paradise Lost while hiding from the justly 
irate royalists. 

119. Milton’s Life was a stormy one; it opened 
serenely and religiously, as we may see from 
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, and the poem 
L'Allegro, and closed in revolt and agony, as we see, 
too, from Samson Agonistes. Milton had three 
daughters, whom he brought up as inferior beings, 
fit only for household work. They were not sent to 
school. He taught them to read five languages, as 
if they were parrots, in order that he might use them 
as his eyes; but they did not learn the meaning of 
what they read. They were named Anne, Mary, and 
Deborah; they resisted his attempts to rule them, 
and he was glad to send them away from home, to 
learn gold and silver embroidery, as a means of 


MILTON AND DRYDEN —1608-1700 115 


earning their living. Milton’s prose is without care¬ 
ful form, though he studied the English language. 
He used in his poems about eight thousand words, 
while Shakspere’s vocabulary amounted to fifteen 
thousand. 

120. John Dry den was born in 1631, at Ald- 
winckle All Saints, in the Valley of the Neu in 
Northamptonshire, England. He was educated at 
Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. 
He went to London in the year 1657. He married 
a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, 1663. In 1675 
he was appointed Historiographer-Royal and Poet- 
Laureate. Dryden has long been a neglected and 
misunderstood poet. Dryden’s memory has been of 
late well defended by Mr. George Saintsbury and 
Mr. John Amphlett Evans, both good students. 
There is only one charge, which is but too well 
grounded; and that is the reproach of licentiousness 
made against the dramas of the poet. Unfortunately, 
he let the gross and sensual atmosphere of the 
Restoration influence him; he was the poet of his 
time; he reflected its worst and its best attributes. 
In his later years, he repented, like Chaucer, and in 
his ode to the memory of the young maid of honor 
to the Duchess of York, Anne Killigrew, he shows 
his regret and asks : — 

“ What can we say to excuse our second fall ? ” 

121. Dryden’s Religion. James II. was a Catholic; 
but, unhappily for the religion he professed, an un- 


116 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


reasonable autocrat. Dryden had been a court 
favorite during the reign of his brother, and he 
received somewhat less favor now. About a year 
after the accession of James, Dryden, who had been 
a Puritan, and, later, an admirer of the Church of 
England, became a Catholic. It has been assumed 
that he changed his religious and political opinions 
for the sake of gain. It is true he had written a 
poem on the death of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell. 
Dryden was a Royalist naturally, and he was no 
more of a time-server than a member of the present 
Democratic Party would be had he written a poem 
in honor of the great qualities of Abraham Lincoln. 
Mr. George Saintsbury, the English critic, quotes 
the great Cardinal Newman’s conversion as a 
parallel case. The poetry of Dryden shows con¬ 
clusively that his conversion was sincere. Mr. 
Saintsbury compares some expressions of Cardinal 
Newman’s with Dry den’s in The Hind and the Pan¬ 
ther. They show a similar condition of mind. In 
The Pillar of the Cloud , Cardinal Newman, hesitating 
on the threshold of the Church, says: — 

“ I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou 
Shouldst lead me on. 

I loved to choose and see my path, but now 
Lead Thou me on ! 

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, 

Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.” 

In The Hind and the Panther , Dryden says: — 


MILTON AND DRYDEN —1608-1700 117 


“ My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires; . 

My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, 

Followed false lights ; and when their glimpse was gone, 

My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.” 

In April, 1687, lie published The Hind and the 
Panther , the most correctly versified of his poems. 
In this poem, he represents as a milk-white hind the 
Catholic Church, persecuted, assailed, but always 
pure. It is in the form of a fable, not an allegory; 
the beasts speak. It is clear, dignified, and it has 
many noble passages. Among them are that on 
Private Judgment , containing the lines just quoted, 
and that on the unity of the Catholic Church, in 
which the verses occur: — 

“ The gospel-sound, diffused from pole to pole, 

Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll, 

The self-same doctrine of the sacred page 
Conveyed to every clime, in every age.” 

He had been sincere in his adhesion to the Church 
of England, and the Religio Laid (1682) is a 
defence of the State opinions. But even in it there 
are signs that his convictions were changing. If 
Dryden, by changing his religion, pleased the king, 
he knew well that he displeased the great majority 
of the English people. He addressed courtly com¬ 
pliments to the Stuarts. It was a time of panegyrics, 
as well as of satire; and Dryden excelled in both. 

122. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) was the polit¬ 
ical satire by which Dryden became famous. It is 


118 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


a masterly satire; the Duke of Monmouth is 
Absalom, and Lord Shaftesbury, Achitophel. Dryden 
is not a courtier in this; if he were, the poem would 
have been powerless with the English people; he 
was a politician and patriot. He was more of a 
partisan at all times than a courtier; his anti-Dutch 
drama, Amboyna , was written when William of 
Orange, a Dutchman, sat on the throne of England. 

123. The form of Dryden’s poems is very correct. 
He succeeded in giving dignity to the rhyming 
couplet. Used by Pope, it is more jingling and 
artificial. Dryden’s odes are as great as Milton’s. 
Compare Milton’s Ode on the Nativity with Dryden’s 
On St. Cecilia's Day, or Milton’s Lycidas with Dry¬ 
den’s Anne Killigrew, or Milton’s LAllegro with 
Dryden’s Alexander's Feast. The Annus Mirabilis, 
a patriotic picture of England’s glories and of the 
great fire in London, appeared in 1667. The Medal 
and MacFlecknoe were political satires, succeeding 
Absalom and Achitophel (1681). In his latter years 
he, retired from court and deprived of his honors, 
made many translations. His fine paraphrase — he 
was more of a paraphraser than a translator — of 
the Veni , Creator Spiritus , is in every hymn-book. 
He published his translation of Virgil in 1697. 
Among his prose works is a translation of Bonhour’s 
Life of St. Francis Xavier. His defence of Poetry, 
which Thomas Arnold has admirably annotated, is 
excellent, though he fails to see as much beauty as 


MILTON AND DRYDEN —1608-1700 119 


there is in his models, the dramas of French writers. 
In 1664 Dry den wrote The Indian Queen, a tragedy, 
and shortly afterwards, The Indian Emperor. In 
All for Love, he dropped the rhyming couplet, and 
used blank verse entirely. It is the best of his 
tragedies. James Russell Lowell calls it “ a noble 
play.” In The Spanish Friar, a very low comedy, 
Aurengzebe, The Rival Ladies, Den Sebastian, The 
Royal Martyr, and The Siege of Granada, he mingles 
the rhymed couplet with blank verse. The Siege of 
Granada, which is so long that it could not be 
played at one representation, is an epic rather than 
a drama. It has not yet received at the hands of 
English critics the praise it deserves. John Dryden 
died at his house in Gerard Street, Soho, London, on 
May 1, 1700 ; he was buried with great pomp in 
Westminster Abbey. His poems are full of brilliant 
lines: — 

“ A Greek, and bountiful, forewarns us twice.” 

“ Forgiveness to the injured does belong, 

But they ne’er pardon who have done the wrong.” 

“ The cause of love can never be assigned, 

’T is in no face, but in the lover’s mind.” 

“ Men are but children of a larger growth, 

Our appetites as apt to change as theirs.” 


CHAPTER XI 


The Augustan Age .— Alexander Pope and his Time. 

— The beginning of Modern English His¬ 
tory.— 1688-1744. 

124. The short reign of Queen Anne is rich in great 
names — as rich almost as the reigns of Elizabeth 
and Victoria. If the reign of Elizabeth gave us 
Shakspere, and that of Victoria, Tennyson, the reign 
of Queen Anne is a veritable Augustan epoch of 
literary giants. The actual reign of this queen ex¬ 
tended from 1702 to 1714 — twelve years. And 
yet in these twelve years an impetus was given 
to literature which seems to be out of all propor¬ 
tion to the character of the sovereign or of the 
time. 

125. When we speak of the literary period of Queen 
Anne, we do not mean only the few years of her 
reign; we mean the whole period which was in¬ 
fluenced especially by the great men who reached 
the height of their intellectual power under her 
reign. There had been a literary interregnum 
between Dryden and Pope. Milton was the poet of 


POPE AND IIIS TIME 


121 


tlie Commonwealth; Dryden, of the Restoration. 
After Dryden, English literature was barren until 
Pope arose. 

126. Of the galaxy of great names of the time of 
Queen Anne, the greatest was that of Alexander 
Pope, who, born in 1688, came in with that new dis¬ 
pensation which brought a German dynasty to the 
throne of England and made it impossible for a 
Stuart to sit again on that throne. Of the men of 
this Augustan time, let us take four, and from their 
lives and their works we shall be able to get more 
of the color and flavor of this period of transition 
than from even Macaulay’s graphic but untrustworthy 
pictures. It is a fault of the historian, Macaulay, 
that he sacrifices truth for effect; and the conse¬ 
quence is that more than one character has been 
damaged by him for the sake of a brilliant anti¬ 
thesis. It is for this reason that the value of his 
work has, since his death, much depreciated among 
scholars. How vivid, how glowing his pictures are! 
— how antithesis plays upon antithesis, like light¬ 
ning about lightning, in his descriptions ! — but the 
flash passes and he leaves us in darkness. Pope has 
suffered very much at the hands of Macaulay. The 
poet had his faults, but he was neither so weak, so 
malicious, nor so insincere as the historian has made 
him out to be. 

127. Pope and Dean Swift, Goldsmith and Dr. 
Johnson are four men who belong to the Augustan 


122 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


age of English letters, and who more than any others 
except Addison gave it its life and tone. 

128. Pope was born twenty-one years after Swift; 
Johnson, in 1709, twenty-one years after Pope, and 
Goldsmith in 1728. Goldsmith died in 1774, Pope 
in 1744, Swift in 1745, and Johnson in 1784. Pope 
and Swift were close friends, and one of the pleas¬ 
antest passages in Dr. Johnson’s life is his friendship 
for Goldsmith. These four, though so divided in the 
number of their years, were contemporaries; and, 
differing in the quality of their talent as one star 
differs from another, they all had the impress of the 
world of their time, which was gradually becoming 
the world of our time. 

129. The Change in the Times.— That spirit of 
romance and recklessness, that high regard for an 
artificial idea of honor and disregard for practices of 
morality, which seemed to mark the Stuarts as the 
last representatives of a lowered chivalry, had passed 
away. The English throne had been lost to the 
male Stuarts and to princes of the Catholic faith 
through Queen Anne’s father, James II. Queen 
Anne, an ungrateful daughter, a stupid woman mar¬ 
ried to a drunken and more stupid prince, gave 
no promise of adding, by her encouragement, any 
new writer to the list of great authors, of whom 
Dryden was the last. 

130. After each political struggle, literature had 
burst into bloom in England with luxuriance. Para- 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


123 


dise Lost had followed the wars of the Common¬ 
wealth ; Hamlet , the fierce political struggle which 
left Elizabeth throned lioness of the West; and now 
that a period of peace had come after the dissensions, 
the plots and counter-plots, the revolts and judicial 
murders, that had characterized the reign of James 
II., literature burst, as it were, into a new spring — 
the palm raised its tall head and the fern clustered 
about its root. Dry den stood alone. He may be 
said to have been the last of the Elizabethans, for he 
had all their spirit — the grandeur, the fire, and, 
unhappily, the freedom of expression of the Renais¬ 
sance ; he was of a new order, yet of the old. He 
had exchanged the doubt which weakened the writ¬ 
ings of his contemporaries for the certitude which 
the Catholic Church offers. Doubt, philosophical 
and religious, had, since the time of Henry VIII., 
been gradually growing in English literature. It is 
a mistake to imagine that infidelity was born in 
France; Voltaire took more from Bolingbroke than 
Bolingbroke and the English took from Voltaire; it 
was in England that Voltaire gained the ammunition 
he afterwards used with such fatal effect. 

131. Pope’s faults and virtues were much accentu¬ 
ated by his early training. His father and mother 
were Catholics, and therefore he was debarred from 
receiving an education at any college or university 
in England. To be a Catholic in 1688, in England, 
was to be, in the eyes of the law, a criminal. Cath- 


124 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


olics were doubly taxed, they could exercise their re¬ 
ligion only by stealth ; they could not own land in 
their own names. Thanks to the friendliness and 
honesty of some of their Protestant neighbors, many 
of them held land in the names of those neighbors. 
All avenues of ambition were closed to Catholics; 
their only hope was in going abroad, in entering some 
great foreign college or some foreign army, — in 
becoming exiles from their own land and citizens of 
another. The Irish nobles and gentry who had 
remained faithful to the tyrannical and weak James 
Stuart to the last, expatriated themselves in this way 
after the battle of the Boyne ; hence we find a Mac- 
Mahon famous in the annals of France, an O’Donnell 
in Spain, a Taafe in Austria, and many Irish and some 
English names high in the service of Continental 
states. But Pope’s father was not a nobleman or a 
soldier; he was a linen draper, and, after the Revo¬ 
lution by which William of Orange and James 
Stuart’s daughter came to the throne of England, 
Pope’s father retired from business and went to Bin- 
field to live. Binfield was not far from Windsor and 
was one of the prettiest spots in England. Here his 
parents lived, in the strictest seclusion, for twenty- 
seven years. 

Alexander was an only child, and he was over-in¬ 
dulged. He went to a small school at Tayford and 
to one at London, as he was, because of his religion, 
kept out of the great public schools. His saddest 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


125 


loss was that of a systematic education. At the age 
of twelve, he left school; he was delicate in health, 
small, and he had curvature of the spine. 

132. Pope lacked a Philosophical Education.— Alex¬ 
ander Pope needed, in his time, when the jar of 
beliefs, philosophies, and opinions was becoming 
loudest, a careful philosophical training : but he did 
not get it; he was allowed to read what he pleased, 
and he read at random, rejecting what he disliked, 
assimilating what pleased him. He was like a bee 
in a garden full of flowers, among which there are 
many that are poisonous. Some of the poison showed 
itself in the honey of the poet; and it is to his lack 
of true philosophical training, and to his reading 
without discretion that are due heresies in his Essay 
on Man and other blemishes in his poems. Pope, 
in the Essay on Man , adopted the false principles of 
Bolingbroke without thinking much about them. 
In consequence, to Pope’s horror, Voltaire, the arch¬ 
infidel, loudly praised the poem and it widely circu¬ 
lated in France. Pope was made to appear as 
an infidel in spite of himself. He was not a scholar; 
he could neither read nor speak French well; he 
knew less Greek probably than Shakspere, and his 
knowledge of Latin was by no means critical. 

133. English History has not the name of any man 
who ascended to such dazzling heights against such 
terrible obstacles as did Alexander Pope, except one 
in more modern times,— Benjamin Disraeli, Lord 


126 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Beaconsfield. Pope, in his day, had, as a Catholic, 
hindrances similar to those which opposed Disraeli, 
the Jew. He met them, and almost deserved the 
proud laudation he gives himself, when he says that, 
“ if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways.” 

The Popes, although much secluded, had some 
friends who lived not far from them; these were the 
Blounts of Mapledurham, a Catholic family. The 
two daughters, Teresa and Martha, had an impor¬ 
tant influence on the poet’s life. An early friend of 
his was William Walsh, a writer of verses, whose 
advice to Pope was admirable: “There have been 
great poets in England, but never one great poet 
that was correct.” The young poet took these 
words to heart, and the English language can boast 
of no poet, except Tennyson, to whom it owes 
more polished lines. Pope’s correctness is half his 
value. 

When Pope was very young his eyes saw rap¬ 
turously the old poet Dry den at the famous Will’s 
coffee-house in London. Dryden was then a “ burly 
figure,” with a red, wrinkled face, long gray hair, 
and a waistcoat powdered with snuff. Pope was a 
worshipper of great literary men. If he could not 
be near the rose himself, he was willing to revere 
one who had been near the rose. Wycherley, a 
celebrated writer of comedies, now grown old, became 
friendly with the precocious lad. Pope’s father and 
mother, strict Catholics as they were, must have been 


POPE AND IIIS TIME 


127 


indeed over-indulgent, to permit this intimacy, for 
Wycherley was one of the most brutally indecent 
writers of the Restoration Period. It may be that 
from Wycherley and the rakish London circle of 
wits to whose company he introduced Pope, he 
acquired a cynical manner of speaking of women. 
If we look into our hearts and ask why Pope, with 
all his genius, with all his keenness, with all his 
common-sense, with all his power of putting the 
most elegant and buoyant and finished shafts to the 
arrows of truth, does not get nearer to them, we 
shall discover that his lack of chivalry, and his 
powerlessness to appreciate true womanhood gives 
the answer. 

134. Pope and the Society of his Time. — Pope 
reflected the spirit of the society in which he lived 
when he left his parents’ quiet home and went to 
London. He was a poet of common-sense, of judg¬ 
ment, of fine art, of keen wit, of brilliant antithesis, 
but never of heroism, of high duty, or of nobility of 
action. He purified poetry from the licentiousness 
of the Restoration Period; he made the inflated and 
bombastic conceits of that time impossible; he was 
the poet of the drawing-room, not of the woods,— a 
retailer of the clever sayings of the assembly, not an 
echo of the mysterious voice of God in nature. 

A glimpse of Pope’s time will tell us something 
of the circumstances that helped to move the man. 
It was a time of political intrigue. Queen Anne, at 


128 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


St. James’ in London, was the sister of the Pre¬ 
tender, who had fled to France. Who would succeed 
her ? The Catholic prince at the Court of King 
Louis, or the Protestant William of Orange ? The 
nobles intrigued with both; and Pope caught this 
spirit of intrigue. It was in the air. He could do 
nothing in a straightforward way; he plotted when 
plots were foolish; his vanity led him into the most 
silly subterfuges for increasing his own importance 
and keeping himself before the eyes of the public. 
He quarrelled with nearly all his friends, and yet he 
was doubtless loved by one of them, Dean Swift, the 
most sarcastic, the most cynical of men, until the 
end. Pope was spiteful; it must be admitted that 
he did not hesitate to equivocate in an unmanly 
fashion to gain a literary object; he was furious at 
times against the enemies who lampooned and 
ridiculed him. But let us remember how malicious, 
how bitter these enemies were, that he was of an 
irritably nervous organization, and that he was never 
quite well. A man with curvature of the spine may 
be excused if he show ill temper at times. And in 
attacking the vulgar tribe of literary mud-flingers 
about him, he, we regret, got more of his own mud 
in return than of theirs; he lowered himself by 
meeting malice with malice. And yet, though Pope 
quarrelled with nearly all his friends, generally from 
some petty motive, he was loved by those who knew 
him best. Vain and vindictive as he appears, he 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


129 


must have had a good heart. When Teresa Blount, 
one of the two sisters who had been his early friends, 
offended him, he, nevertheless, saved her from the 
pressure of poverty. He sneered at those who 
sneered at him; he lived to be famous; he cultivated 
his reputation as a gardener might cultivate a splen¬ 
did flower, and he was not scrupulous as to the 
means he employed in so doing. To speak plainly, 
he did not tell the truth at times and he pretended 
what he did not feel. 

135. Pope’s crippled condition.—He was a sickly 
cripple, socially — being the son of a tradesman — 
inferior to those around him; he used the arms of 
the weak against the strong. As Matthew Arnold 
says: — 

“ For each day brings its petty dust, 

Our soon-choked souls to fill, 

And we forget because we must, 

And not because we will.” 

But poor Pope had not that blessed gift of for¬ 
getting, which so marvellously helps us to forgive. 
He loved his father and mother devotedly; he 
assisted men and women who were poor; he clung 
to his friend Bolingbroke, in spite of his disgrace; 
he helped Dr. Johnson to the utmost of his power,— 
a friendliness which the latter afterwards transferred 
to Goldsmith. His devotion to his father and mother 
was intense; the latter lived the longer. Alluding 
to her he writes: — 


9 


130 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ She let the tender office long engage, 

To rock the cradle of declining age, 

With lenient acts extend a mother’s breath, 

Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death, 
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, 

And keep awhile one parent from the sky.” 

Pope wrote this from his heart. The only fault 
that can be found with it is its monotony — the 
rhymes make it jingle too gaily. How much more 
dignified would this be in a measure without rhyme, 
or in one in which the rhyme was not so closely 
recurrent. 

136. One of the most dignified letters of Pope’s is 
that written to Atterbury, in which he refuses to 
change his religion for the sake of temporal advan¬ 
tages. Pope’s faith during his life was not of the 
militant order; he believed, but he was not partic¬ 
ularly zealous. He lived in a social world in which 
convictions were not fashionable,— a world of blue 
china, and assemblies, and high play at cards, and 
witty sayings, and low bows, and graceful courtesies, 
— in which the set of the patches on a lady’s face 
and the texture of the lace ruffles a man wore at his 
wrists were more important than faith or morals. 
It was an age of politeness, of manners, of artificial¬ 
ity. To understand it, one must read the letters of 
Lord Chesterfield. It is to Pope’s credit that he pre¬ 
served his love for his parents, his love for the Abbd 
Southcote and earlier friends. Pope gives us a 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


131 


glimpse of the manners of his age in that charmingly 
lyrical bit of light verse, The Rape of- the Lock. 
Lord Petre, one of the aristocratic circle of Catholic 
families in which Pope had friends, had been one 
of a water party on the Thames. Among the ladies 
was Miss Arabella Eermor, who was noted for the 
beauty of her hair. Lord Petre cuts off a lock, just 
as Belinda (Miss Fermor) is bending over her coffee. 
Pope, in an exaggerated tone, says : — 

“ Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, 

And screams of horror rend th’ affrighted skies. 

Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast, 

When husbands, or when lap-dogs, breathe their last; 

Or when rich China vessels fall’n from high, 

In glitt’ring dust and painted fragments lie! ” 

Lord Petre’s impudence brought about a quarrel 
among the families; and a friend of theirs proposed 
that Pope should treat the subject in an airy fashion, 
and thus help to bring about a reconciliation. The 
Belinda of the poem was of course Miss Fermor; 
the Baron, Lord Petre; Tlialestris is Mrs. Morley • 
Sir Plume is Mrs. Morley’s brother, Sir George Brown 
of Haddington. Miss Fermor was much offended 
by the cynical and condescending manner which 
Pope assumed in the poem towards her and all 
women, and everybody concerned was more indig¬ 
nant than before. Nevertheless, it is one of the most 
brilliant of that light form of poetry which we call 
“ society verses.” 


132 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


137. The tone of the Augustan age towards women, 
as shown in the essayists and poets influenced by it, 
was sneering and satirical. Even the elegant Addi¬ 
son seems to look on women as pretty toys — fit only 
to paste a black patch over a dimple, to put a touch 
of rouge on their cheeks, and to use a fan with all 
the graceful artificiality which the politeness of the 
time had elevated into an art. Dean Swift was bru¬ 
tal in his treatment of women, and Dr. Johnson 
admired their prettiness in a lordly way. Goldsmith 
alone, of these four, understood them and wrote of 
them with a respectful reverence that was almost 
awe. 

138. The fashionable London lady of Pope’s and 
Swift’s, of Goldsmith’s and Johnson’s time was not a 
serious person. To see the simple and gracious 
woman, one would have had to seek the country 
places. Thackeray, in The Virginians, gives us 
opportunities of understanding this. The lady of 
Pope’s time arose at twelve o’clock. At one her 
morning toilet was probably completed. Her maid 
touched her cheeks and lips with red, put a patch 
just where it would help to increase the brilliancy of 
her eyes or the plumpness of her cheek, and brought 
her a cup of chocolate. Then she probably saw her 
dressmaker or considered her engagements for the day. 

About one o’clock, the promenade in the Park 
began. A young man — and some old ones — who 
had spent the night in card-playing at one of the 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


133 


fashionable coffee-houses, appeared in a full white 
wig, with a cocked hat edged with silver carried 
under his left arm, and his sword ornamented with a 
knot of ribbon of the favorite color of the lady he 
happened to be in love with. He wore a handker¬ 
chief of the finest Flemish lace about his throat; 
his waistcoat was left open at the top, showing a 
ruffled shirt, and from a buttonhole in his coat fell 
his muff, usually of fox-skin. Let us imagine the 
young Lord Petre coming out of Pall Mall to the Park 
about half-past one o’clock in the day. His wig is 
very high, and elaborately powdered, his silver-bor¬ 
dered flat hat is carried under his left arm, his cane, 
tied to his wrist by a ribbon, “ trails harmoniously on 
the pebbles,” he carries his fringed gloves in his left 
hand, and an elaborate snuff-box, painted with the 
head of some Tory politician or perhaps some reign¬ 
ing “ toast,” as the “ professional beauty ” was then 
called. He wears a silver-embroidered white brocade 
coat, with a waistcoat of some more brilliant color: 
his delicate lace cravat is, according to the fashion, 
softly powdered with snuff; the tails of his coat, lined 
with tender-colored azure or puce silk, — puce was 
the color known to-day as heliotrope, — are stiffened 
with wire. He lounges along until he reaches a 
pond in the Park, where ducks are swimming. He 
stops there, feeding the fowl, and making, in his own 
estimation, a very pretty picture, while the ladies pass 
and admire him — that is, those who are not too much 


134 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


engrossed in admiring themselves. He is particularly 
proud of the silver-embroidered stockings which 
match his suit, and of the high red heels of his shoes. 

139. The fashionable life of Pope’s time.—The lady 
when, after her chocolate, she appeared in public, 
was fearfully and wonderfully made. A hoop dis¬ 
tended her skirts, which were of satin, velvet, or 
some other rich material, brocaded in bunches of gold 
and silver flowers; she wore long, stiff, tightly laced 
bodices, with large panniers on either side ; her hair 
— very little of it her own — towered a foot at least 
above her head, so that it was difficult to get into a 
sedan chair. When she was in, the bearers of this 
fashionable conveyance took hold of the shafts, threw 
the harness over their shoulders, and trotted with 
their fair burden towards the Park or the assembly. 
Carried in their chairs or drawn in their carriages, 
they trifled away time, varying their lounge in the 
Park with a visit to a jeweller’s or bric-k-brac shops. 
They dined at four o’clock. After this they went to 
an afternoon “ tea ” and then to the Italian opera or 
the theatre. Later, they had supper; after supper 
they gambled, for card-playing was the passion of 
the age; fortunes were lost and won; and men and 
women vied with one another in devotion to various 
games of chance. There were assemblies, too, where 
the stately minuet was danced and the contradances, 
one of which survives in our Virginia reel, known in 
England as the Sir Roger de Coverley. Conversation 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


135 


was an art brought to the highest perfection, and 
much of Pope’s most brilliant verse is simply the talk 
of his time. When he was at Kis best, he was above 
his age; when at his worst, he reflected its spirit. 

140. The time was “ out of joint.” — It was a 
miserable time. The stupid Queen, alternately ruled 
by her waiting-maid and by the arrogant Duchess 
of Marlborough, gave no elevated example. The 
English Church was a political machine; there were 
fox-hunting parsons, drinking parsons, gambling 
parsons, but few who cared for the souls of their 
people. Parishes were given to men of irregular 
lives then, just as politicians divide places now. 
St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, was an open infidel; 
most of the men around him were unbelievers at 
least. Treachery in politics was a virtue; if a man 
or woman were fashionable or clever, it made no 
difference whether he were good or not. 

The ladies of the time of Queen Mary and the 
Georges thought more of an apt speech, a cutting 
repartee, or the skilful management of the fan (you 
remember Addison’s fan drill in The Spectator) 
than of goodness. Perhaps this is the reason why 
Pope’s women are all coquettes, with nothing of the 
Portia or Cordelia in them. In a pointed line he 
says:— 

“ Most women have no character at all.” 
and again: — 

u But every woman is at heart a rake.” 


136 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


141. A “ Wit ” in Pope’s time meant a scholar; 
and a rake an extravagant man, given to reckless 
pleasure; Pope meant that every woman, though she 
could not gamble and drink as the rakes of the 
town did, was in sympathy with them. 

142. Pope’s early Poems. The Pastorals are, as 
Leslie Stephens says, “mere schoolboy exercises.” 
His poem Windsor Forest appeared in 1713 — a 
year before the death of Queen Anne; it contains 
pleasant descriptions, and its manner is lively. The 
Temple of Fame (1715) was a bad imitation of 
Chaucer; the Eloisa to Abelard and The Elegy to 
the Memory of an unfortunate Lady appeared in 
1717. The lines in the former are very sentimental, 
very coarse, and very well versified. One of the 
epigrams in this poem has been quoted, as most of 
his epigrams have, a thousand times: — 

“ How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot, 

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.” 


But how many epigrams Pope left us. They are 
polished and clear-cut. For instance,— 

“ Shoot folly as it flies.” 

“ The proper study of mankind is man.” 

“ Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.” 

“ A little learning is a dangerous thing.” 

“ The last and greatest art — the art to blot.” 

“ Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.” 

“ Men must be taught as if you taught them not.” 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


137 


“ Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” 

44 An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” 

“T is with our judgments as our watches ; none 
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.” 

143. The Rape of the Lock appeared in 1714 and 
made Pope famous. The town talked of it and 
admired it. The little man, who had to be sewed up 
in buckram every day to keep him straight, and to 
have a raised seat at table that he might be on a 
level with others, was the most flattered and sought 
after of all the London wits. Addison was at this 
time prince of writers ; he was friendly to Pope, who 
was to succeed him, but they quarrelled. The 
Essay on Criticism appeared in 1711; the poet’s 
allusions made him enemies. Among these was a 
writer named Dennis, who savagely attacked Pope. 
The latter answered venomously by an allusion to 
Dennis’ poverty in the Epistle to Arbutlinot (1735). 
By this time he had quarrelled with the much- 
praised Addison, and in this also he writes the 
cruelest satire of his late friend. 

144. If Addison ceased to be a friend of Pope’s, 
Dean Swift, who had been attracted by Windsor 
Forest, became a warm admirer of his. Thackeray, 
in his lecture on Swift says: “ That Swift was born 
at No. 7 Hoey’s Court, Dublin, on the 30th of 
November, 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody 
will deny the sister island the honor and glory; but 
it seems to me he was no more an Irishman than a 


138 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. 
Goldsmith was an Irishman, and always an Irish¬ 
man ; Steele was an Irishman, and always an 
Irishman; Swift’s heart was English.” He was 
poor and proud, well educated at Trinity College, 
Dublin, where, later, Edmund Burke and Goldsmith 
studied at the same time, and where their statues 
now stand. He became secretary to Sir William 
Temple — a sort of lackey, with twenty pounds a 
year — and here he served in anguish of heart, 
sitting at the servants’ table, with the pride of 
Lucifer. He became a clergyman of the Church of 
England, not for love of religion, but for love of 
preferment; he was ambitious; he confesses that he 
works only that he may become rich and great. He 
wanted to be a bishop, but he became only a dean. 
We see him a brutal man of genius, hating his race, 
causing two women to love him, and at last marry¬ 
ing Stella and leaving Vanessa to die of a broken 
heart. There are lines in Swift which no decent 
man would read, or, if by chance he read them, not 
strive to forget them. His Gulliver's Travels , writ¬ 
ten out of hatred for mankind, has become a chil¬ 
dren’s book — strange metamorphosis. At last, after 
bitter tortures of heart, after enduring slights which 
fell to the lot of only a poor chaplain in those days, 
he intrigued his way to what the world called great¬ 
ness. Then he did his best for Pope. We find a 
contemporary picture of his swelling through the 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


139 


crowd at court, a personage of immense importance, 
and knowing it well. He turns from a great lord to 
a poor kanger-on, only to show his independence. 
He tells a young nobleman that the best poet in 
England is Mr. Pope, “ a Papist,” who has begun a 
translation of Homer into English, for which he 
wanted subscriptions; “ for,” he said, “ he shall not 
begin to print until I have a thousand guineas for 
him.” Thackeray says of the Dean’s kindness: 
“ I think I would rather have had a potato and a 
friendly word from Goldsmith than have been be¬ 
holden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner. He 
insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, 
guests look foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and 
flung his benefactions into poor men’s faces. No! 
the Dean was no Irishman — no Irishman ever gave 
but with a kind word and a true heart.” 

145. Pope loved this irreligious clergyman, — why, 
we cannot understand. “ His eyes are azure as the 
heavens and have a charming archness in them,” 
Pope says. And yet this arch and azure-eyed person 
raged at all we hold dear. How sweetly he jokes 
about eating little children. “ I have been assured,” 
he writes, in his Modest Proposal , “ by a very know¬ 
ing American of my acquaintance in London, that a 
young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, 
a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, 
whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” The 
blighting frost of his wit played over all things that 


140 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


most of us hold sacred. No wonder that he lived 
a wretched life, and died raving mad. He knew 
death was coming, and he knew, too, that only three 
friends would grieve for him — and the truest of 
these was Pope. He says: — 

" Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay 
A week, and Arbuthnot a day; 

St. John himself will scarce forbear 
To bite his pen and drop a tear ; 

The rest will give a shrug and cry, 

’T is pity — but we all must die.” 

Pope’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey made 
him a rich man; he gained from them £9000 — 
and as money was then worth twice its present value 
we may place his profits at one hundred thousand 
dollars at least. Strange as it may seem, Pope trans¬ 
lated Homer without much Greek, and with only 
a very little of Latin. He simply used former 
translations, put them into his own language, and 
he produced some noble passages. But Pope’s 
Homer is not Homer’s Homer. The Odyssey was 
published in 1725, and then Pope wrote The 
Danciad, a stinging satire on his enemies. As an 
exercise in the couplet, it is a marvellous work of 
art; it is invaluable, too, to the student of contem¬ 
porary history; but, as Taine says, “ Seldom has so 
much talent been expended to produce so much 
weariness.” Henceforth Pope mixed morality and 
personal reflections. During ten years he wrote: 


POPE AND HIS TIME 


141 


Moral Essays , Essay on Man , Imitations of Ilomer , 
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and the Epilogue to the 
Satires. Pope excuses the sting of his satire by one 
more stinging: — 

“ You think this cruel 1 Take this for a rule, 

No creature smarts so little as a fool.” 

146. Toward the end of his life this bitter poet 
grew gentler. With the Spanish king, who was 
asked if he forgave his enemies, Pope might have 
answered, “ Certainly — I have killed them all.” 
He spent the last years at his pleasant villa at 
Twickenham; and there he died, on May 30, 1744. 
In his last hour he turned towards the God whom 
his father and mother had taught him to adore. He 
fervently received the last sacraments. He was 
buried beside the parents he had so tenderly loved, 
and there he lies — the bitterness burned out, the 
malice gone. 


CHAPTER XII 


The Augustan Age. — Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. 

Johnson 

147. You have read of the fauns of the Pagan 
mythology — those strange creatures who loved the 
sunlight and the woods, who were not quite men, 
and not quite animals, but who were harmless and 
playful, and sometimes grotesque. Oliver Goldsmith 
had something of the faun in his composition. He 
loved all the sights and sounds of nature; he loved 
to wander among the rural poor, to play the flute 
while they danced on the village green, and he was 
happiest among the least artificial forms of life. In 
this he offers a striking contrast to Pope, who pre¬ 
ceded him in the line of poetic descent from Dryden. 
Pope, as you know, loved the atmosphere of the 
assembly and the coffee-house; the glaze of blue 
china was pleasanter to his sight than the azure of 
the sky, and the rustle of a lady’s court-train at a 
rout, or the trailing of a gentleman’s cane over the 
stones of Pall Mall, sweeter than country sounds to 
his hearing. But Goldsmith was genuine; he had 
no love for the artificiality of his time. Pope was 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


143 


born forty years before Goldsmith, and yet, when 
Goldsmith went to London, the manners and customs 
of the English upper classes had changed very little. 
The English form of government had ceased to be 
what it had been, but English social life was not 
materially different from English life in the days 
of Pope. 

148. The Manners of Goldsmith’s Times. — People 
amused themselves very much, and at the same 
time their manners were more formal than ours are 
now. And yet, with all their formality, they were 
more coarse. The English did not become civilized 
until a later period than the Continental peoples, 
and their manners were almost as coarse under the 
first Georges as they were under Elizabeth. No 
gentlewoman in our time could listen to the lan¬ 
guage of Queen Elizabeth without a blush; and we 
are told by a good authority, the Duchess of Eeria, 
that Queen Mary, her sister, was the marvel of the 
Court because her speech was so pure. The king, 
Henry VIII., did not believe this possible until he 
had sent some one to test the truth of it! Similarly, 
the license of speech permitted in the days of Pope 
and Swift would have shocked any decent man in 
our time. And we may be grateful to the best of 
the English poets that they were purer than their 
age. The men who reflected the corruption of man¬ 
ners are dead to us; the poets who were pure, live. 

149. No English writer will live longer in the 


144 


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hearts of men than Oliver Goldsmith, “Noll,” as 
he was sometimes called,— “ Goldy,” as the great 
Dr. Johnson liked to call him. “ He had the Celtic 
generosity, with the Celtic recklessness — he never 
refused to lend money when he had it, and he died 
owing ten thousand dollars. All beggars loved him 
and all borrowers clung to him; he would find a 
home for the homeless, and give his last crust of 
bread to the hungry, with a benediction. Reduced 
to poverty one day, he would the next, when some 
funds came to him, buy an expensive velvet suit — 
he was particularly fond of plum color. He was 
constantly getting money, before he became an 
author, from his kind uncle Contarine, and spending 
it as rapidly and as foolishly as he got it. While 
at Leyden, in Holland, presumably completing his 
medical studies, he was induced to play cards, after 
having made a resolution never to do so. He lost 
all his money and was obliged to borrow some. He 
was alone in a strange land with perhaps two 
guineas in his pocket. Leyden was rich in flower- 
gardens crowded with tulips, then as precious as 
orchids are now. He remembered that his uncle 
Contarine was fond of flowers, and he spent half his 
money for a high-priced bulb to send to him. He 
had the fatal Irish objection to saying “ No,” and 
the lovely Irish virtue of generosity, which, however, 
in forgetting to be just to itself, is often unjust to 
others. 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


145 


150. Oliver Goldsmith unlike Dean Swift.— Oliver 
Goldsmith, though of English descent, was more 
Irish than the Irish themselves. He came of a fam¬ 
ily of clergymen of the Church of England, and his 
father seems to have expected in a vague kind of 
way that he would become a clergyman too. He 
must have been a queer little fellow. There is a 
story — which William Black, in his sketch of 
Goldsmith, discredits — showing that he was a very 
clever child. He was uncouth, very small, pitted 
with the small-pox. He was called “ a stupid, heavy 
blockhead,” and perhaps he deserved that title! But 
the story runs that once when he was gambolling at 
a dancing party at his uncle’s house, the fiddler, 
struck by the almost dwarfish look of the boy, cried 
out “iEsop,” and, quick as thought, the awkward 
boy replied: — 

11 Our herald hath proclaimed this saying, 

See iEsop dancing and his monkey playing.” 

Later in life, Goldsmith had no power of repartee. 
The most brutal ignoramus, whose retort in society 
was nothing but a horse-laugh, could put him to 
shame. He was sensitive, and, like other sensitive 
people, he was anxious for the good opinion of those 
around him. Put a pen in his hand and he could 
talk as charmingly as the most brilliant conversation¬ 
alist of the salon of Madame de Bambouillet; but, in 
society, he thought of all the good things he might 
10 


146 


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have said when the opportunity for saying them was 
gone. 

151. Goldsmith’s work, like that of most authors, 
is autobiographical. One can discover very easily 
the qualities of the man and his experience in his 
poems, his plays, his great novel. Goldsmith was 
born at Pallas, in the county of Longford, on 
November 10, 1728. Here his father was “ passing 
rich on forty pounds a year.” About two years later 
Mr. Goldsmith moved to Lissoy, in the county of 
Westmeath. In Lissoy is recognized the Auburn of 
The Deserted Village. Macaulay protests against 
this identification. The historian presumes that no 
smiling Irish village, such as that described as 
Auburn, could, in a short time, be turned into a 
desert place by evictions — in fact, he insinuates 
that there never have been pleasant and flourishing 
villages in Ireland. We must look on this as cool 
judgment has led us to look on a great many of 
Macaulay’s brilliant hypotheses. Goldsmith idealized 
Lissoy; but there can be no doubt that this beloved 
place was the original of Auburn. Macaulay might 
as well have said that Longfellow’s picture of the 
forced emigration of the Acadians was false or over¬ 
drawn. Lissoy might not have in all respects been 
the Auburn of The Deserted Village; we must 
allow for that glamour which affectionate remem¬ 
brance casts over the scenes of childhood. 

152. Goldsmith’s school-life was not serene. He 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


147 


was the butt of his companions; he was not strong 
enough to answer their blows with blows; he was 
not clever enough to retaliate with his tongue. His 
life at home must have been cheerful, for no man 
who had not a cheerful home could have painted 
such an interior as that of the Vicar’s house. The 
clergyman in the Vicar of Wakefield was drawn 
from his father, — a simple, kind-hearted, gentle old 
man, ready to sacrifice everything for his children; 
and the blundering Moses had some of the qualities 
of Goldsmith himself. 

A clergyman with forty pounds a year, even when 
money was worth twice what it is now, was not rich. 
Goldsmith’s father had somewhat more than this at 
Lissoy; but he was far from being well off, and, 
when he died, he left almost nothing. Oliver had 
been sent to Trinity College. He went as a sizar, — 
that is, he was given his education on condition of 
performing certain menial duties. He did not like 
this; he complained that he had to sleep in a garret; 
and on a window pane in this garret his name may 
still be seen. 

His uncle tried to console him with the informa¬ 
tion that he had been a sizar in his time; some of 
the most eminent men in Great Britain had earned 
their education in this way. If he could pass 
through Trinity College with credit, his success, pro¬ 
vided he should use ordinary industry and prudence, 
was assured. Nothing was required of him, except 


148 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


that he should endure certain minor hardships and, 
in return, receive the best equipment his country 
could give him. 

153. Goldsmith’s Weakness a Lesson to Youth.— 

But Goldsmith, whose genius might have conquered 
all difficulties, refused to conquer himself. This 
was his fatal misfortune. Had he had the prudence 
and perseverance of Pope, he might have lived com¬ 
fortably, died at least serenely, and left even greater 
evidences of his genius than we have. Reason was 
little to him, inclination everything. At the age of 
twenty-one, after several escapades, he took his 
degree, lowest on the list. The world was before 
him. Poor as he was, he had enjoyed advantages 
that are better than riches, — advantages which, had 
his father been the richest man in Great Britain, 
were all he could have bestowed on his son. Up to 
the age of twenty-one, he had been asked to do 
nothing but improve his mind. In spite of his love 
of aimless wandering and his hatred of control, he 
had learned how to study; and, later in life, he was 
forced to be industrious, for steadily increasing debts, 
the results of thoughtless extravagance, dogged him 
to death. He started in the world sensitive, gen¬ 
erous, reckless, timid, and yet capable of assuming 
the most audacious self-sufficiency, in order to con¬ 
ceal his natural shyness. Once on his way from 
school, with only one guinea in his pocket, he felt 
very proud indeed. He resolved to make the best 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


149 


of the golden coin, which, as was always the case 
with him, seemed to hold indefinite capacities for 
pleasure until it was gone. He determined to stop 
at the best house in a village which he entered as 
night came on; he inquired for the inn in a most 
condescending way, and a wag sent him to the 
squire’s house. The squire humored the joke, and 
the youthful spendthrift, thinking of the vast re¬ 
sources of the guinea still unspent in his pocket, 
ordered the servants about in a mighty manner and 
patronizingly asked the host and his wife to have a 
bottle of wine with him. On this episode he based 
his charming comedy, She Stoops to Conquer. Tony 
Lumpkin, the good-natured and uncouth country 
boy, in this comedy — or perhaps we may call it, 
as we call Shakspere’s Taming of the Shrew, a 
farce — is too stupid to be a picture of Goldsmith 
himself, but Tony has some of Noll’s propensities 
highly developed. This is one of the most delight¬ 
ful comedies ever written in any language. It has 
the fine humor of Molikre and a vivacity of diction 
that is more French than English. 

He preferred idleness to work, and a happy-go- 
lucky existence in an Irish village to the unknown 
opportunities of the great world. His relatives more 
than hinted that he ought to choose a profession. 
He tried to enter the English Church, which at this 
time was a refuge for many singular people, as one 
may see by perusing the various chronicles of the 


150 


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time and Thackeray’s Virginians. It seems that 
Goldsmith, with his usual fondness for gay attire, 
clothed himself in scarlet, and the Bishop of Elphin 
would not permit him to be examined. He became 
a tutor, through the influence of the long-suffering 
uncle Contarine; he started, bedewed with the tears 
of his mother, and no doubt followed by the thanks¬ 
givings of all his other relatives, to Cork, to embark 
for America. But he spent his money and came 
back, telling a story of having been robbed, — a story 
so improbable, that nobody, except his mother 
and uncle Contarine, could have been foolish 
enough to believe it. The kind uncle gave him 
fifty guineas more, and he started for Dublin to 
study law. He was back again, penniless, in a short 
time. Uncle Contarine gave him another chance; 
he was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, and 
he went away, never to return to Ireland again. 
But in his dreams he was often there; when he 
wrote his immortal poem, The Deserted Village, 
her greenness was always before his eyes; all the 
flaming tulips of Holland, all the heavy-headed 
roses of France, all the exotics of London, were as 
nothing to him compared with the dew-besprent 
shamrocks of his native fields. At the Italian Opera, 
when a great singer warbled — and Goldsmith was 
an intelligent amateur of music — he closed his eyes 
and went back to Lis soy, longing in his heart for 
the old, familiar airs. The youth in search of for- 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


151 


tune did not remain long in Edinburgh. Of course 
lie wanted more money that he might pursue his 
studies in medicine on the Continent, where there 
were great professors. He went to Holland, and 
drew money from the credulous uncle Contarine, 
until at last even his almost exhaustless patience 
ceased to be a virtue. 

154. From 1755 to 1756 he travelled in Europe, 
and wrote elaborate letters to his uncle Contarine, — 
letters which are not too refined to omit a reference 
to the financial needs of the author. How he trav¬ 
elled, nobody knows. There is a rumor that he 
played the flute to admiring peasants and at the doors 
of convents, but as this has a tinge of romance, it 
was probably invented by himself; William Black 
says that he begged his way — at any rate, he re¬ 
turned with a doctor’s L degree and nothing else to 
speak of. 

155. He still idles.—A cloud covered Goldsmith at 
this period. There was no more money from uncle 
Contarine. He had no friends in London; his pitted 
and ugly face was against him; his Lissoy brogue 
was against him; he did not know which way to 
turn; he seemed to have failed utterly and through 
his own fault. Still, he was cheerful and generous, 
even with his crusts. He found a place as tutor in 
a school, and, later, as a hack writer for a publisher 
called Griffiths. He quarrelled with Griffiths; and 
we find him at the age of thirty, already in debt for 


152 


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a new suit of clothes, and with no place among the 
world’s workers. 

156. His first literary work was an attack on the 
critics, in the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite 
Learning in Europe ; his second, a magazine called 
The Bee, to which he was the sole contributor. 
“ There is not,” he said, in his first short essay in this 
periodical, “ perhaps a more whimsically dismal figure 
in Nature than a man of real modesty, who assumes 
an air of impudence, who, while his heart beats with 
anxiety, studies ease and affects good humor.” 
Goldsmith was this “ whimsically dismal ” creature at 
this time; but those who understood him found his 
subtle Irish humor delightful in conversation. His 
letters supposed to be written by an observing Chi¬ 
nese, under the title of the Citizen of the World , came 
next. They are very keen, very clear, but without 
bitterness. What a contrast they offer to the cynical 
satire of Pope’s hits at folly! If he says that the 
women of the city wear patches all over their faces, 
except on the tips of their noses, or makes fun of the 
elderly lady who appears in the Park dressed as a 
girl of sixteen, there is no jeer or sneer at woman¬ 
hood in his humor. His heart was always gentle; 
he never forgot, like Swift, that he had a mother ; he 
never wrote of women as if they were heartless pup¬ 
pets, like Pope; he was, as Sir Walter Scott says, 
always on the side of virtue. 

157. Johnson’s Kindness.—Admirers of talent begin 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


153 


to find him out, and among them is autocratic, pom¬ 
pous, kind-hearted, pious, generous Dr. Johnson — 
the great literary Tsar of his time. If you want to 
know in what reverence he was held, you will find it 
reflected in the amazement of Becky Sharp’s school¬ 
mistress when that too clever young lady throws the 
august Doctor’s dictionary out of the carriage win¬ 
dow, in the first chapter of Vanity Fair, and Miss 
Jemima Pinkerton almost faints with horror. To be 
sought out by this great man, who was in Gold¬ 
smith’s time what Addison had been in Pope’s, was 
a marvellous honor. And Goldsmith, though a 
greater genius than Johnson, was always grateful for 
it. We are told by Boswell, the author of the finest 
biography in the English language, that Goldsmith 
was envious of Johnson, when in fact simple, honest, 
loyal Oliver was incapable of envy. He may have 
been irritated by the constant, fulsome praise of the 
author of Rasselas which thickened the air around 
him, as if a bottle of musk had to be broken when¬ 
ever he opened his mouth; and it is certain that 
Boswell the admirer and Johnson the dictator, with 
their coterie of flatterers, must have been sufficiently 
exasperating to warrant occasional expressions of 
impatience from Goldsmith. He never tore and rent 
his friend, as Pope tore and rent Addison, with the 
cruelest stabs of satire in our language. Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, Edmund Burke, and other great men 
became his friends. 


154 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


For a time Goldsmith disappeared from among 
them. He had run into debt for fine clothes and 
other things, — he acknowledged that his principal 
objection to becoming a clergyman was because 
he could not wear colored clothes,—and one day Dr. 
Johnson received a message to the effect that he 
was in danger of arrest for a debt to his landlady. 
Johnson sent him a guinea, and followed it as 
quickly as he could; he found that Goldsmith had 
already changed it, for there was a bottle of Madeira, 
with a glass, before him. Johnson corked the bottle, 
and Goldsmith told him that he was much in debt for 
rent, but that he had an unpublished novel in his 
desk. Johnson looked at the manuscript, saw that 
it had merit, and went to a bookseller and sold it for 
sixty pounds. This novel, sold to pay Goldsmith’s 
rent and to keep him out of prison, was the famous 
Vicar of Wakefield. Later, its proceeds would have 
paid Goldsmith’s rent hundreds of times over. 

158. In 1764 there were no English Poets.— Sud¬ 
denly there appeared a poem that had all Pope’s art 
and none of his artificiality, all his consummate pol¬ 
ish, with more depth of thought and sincerity than 
he had ever had. But perhaps Goldsmith’s style 
would have been impossible, if Pope had not purified 
the expression of English verse for him, as Dryden 
purified it for Pope. The Traveller took England by 
storm. Goldsmith had written it over and over again, 
chastening and improving each epithet until it was 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


155 


as clear as crystal and as direct as a needle to the 
pole. He had wrought, not for money this time, 
but for fame — and he got both. The Traveller is a 
series of lovely pictures, shown, like a panorama, to 
the sound of a series of as lovely melodies. Macau¬ 
lay admires very much the plot and the philosophy of 
this poem, while he declares that Goldsmith’s plots 
were generally bad. The value of The Traveller lies 
not in the fable or in the philosophy ; the reflections 
of the English tourist, who from a crag in the Alps 
looks down on the countries beneath, have no partic¬ 
ular interest; we do not care much about him or his 
conclusion that, in spite of circumstances, our happi¬ 
ness depends on the regulation of our minds. 

Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller (1764) is a series 
of beautiful pictures. Its verse is exquisitely musi¬ 
cal. He had worked carefully upon it. Talent and 
care had produced genius. 

The success of The Traveller made The Vicar of 
Wakefield successful. A new poetic star had arisen, 
announced by the infallible authority, Dr. Johnson, 
as the greatest since Pope, and a novel by this para¬ 
gon must be in the hands of every person of taste. 
The fashionable ladies wept over the trials of the 
Vicar and laughed at poor Moses and the spectacles, 
while their hair was powdered for the assembly; in 
the town of Bath, the most modish of resorts for 
health, the beaux and belles talked over it as they 
drank the waters in the pump room. 


156 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Books were coming into fashion again, but cards 
were not going out. Everybody gambled; Gold¬ 
smith, in his earlier days, had gambled too; and even 
the good Dr. Johnson regretted that he was ignorant 
of cards. We can imagine this good Dr. Johnson, in 
a laced waistcoat with certain grease-spots on it, for 
he was not as careful as he might have been, discuss¬ 
ing the beauties of his friend’s poem to a chosen 
circle at some great lady’s feast. Goldsmith seldom 
went to such feasts, for he had an awe of ladies 
attired in all their splendor. But Johnson occasion¬ 
ally condescended to take tea, a dozen dishes or so, — 
our ancestors never spoke of cups, — with Lady 
Betty Modish or some other personage of the grand 
world. And then the good Doctor enjoyed himself, 
for he was fond of eating, and we may be sure that 
if he helped himself to a dozen dishes of tea he did 
not spare more solid viands. And all the while he 
talked in his sonorous way, showing a deep Christian 
reverence for Christian things, until the great lady 
fears that he will one day die a Papist, like the late 
Mr. Pope. But the Doctor shakes his head, though 
he believes in making satisfaction for sin even in 
this world, and there is a story that he stood for a 
long time bare-headed in the rain before a shop in his 
native place for some unfilial act committed against 
his parents. 

159. A Picture of Manners. — The good Doctor is 
dining at three o’clock with the great lady, whose 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


157 


hair is magnificently beribboned and powdered; it 
towers high, and her gown of satin, with silver flow¬ 
ers, has elaborate panniers; she taps the table with a 
fan painted with shepherds and shepherdesses by 
Watteau; she is dressed, not because the great Doc¬ 
tor is there, but because she is going to sit in a box at 
the theatre after dinner, and see Dr. Goldsmith’s 
new play, The Good-Natured Man , — for Dr. Gold¬ 
smith has so been emboldened by the success of The 
Traveller and The Vicar of Wakefield that he has 
tried to conquer the stage. There is a young lady of 
the court, too, in less elaborate dress than her friend’s, 
with a lower head-gear, who hopes that Mr. Gold¬ 
smith’s play will not be too funny. She is of the opin¬ 
ion that one ought to cry at a comedy, and that laugh¬ 
ter is vulgar; besides, she says, ’t is the fashion to cry 
at the theatre — did she herself not spoil a cherry- 
colored satin gown with her tears the other night at 
the comedy of False Delicacy ? 

But the Doctor does not answer, because his mouth 
is full. Spread before these three people are a sir¬ 
loin of beef, a shoulder of veal, and a tongue and 
some fish, and Bordeaux and Burgundy and cider. 
After this course will come orange and almond pud¬ 
ding, and heavy fritters — which the great and 
fashionable lady will help with her hands, as is the 
custom, not disdaining to lick the grease from her 
fingers in a gleeful way which causes the amiable 
Doctor to smile. A little later soup, pork puddings, 


158 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


and roast goose will be served; but my lady will 
refuse them, saying that she has no appetite, as she 
has taken a tankard of ale and some stewed chicken 
about half an hour ago. 

The young lady tells how a very pleasant young 
gentleman of her acquaintance hired three fiddlers 
and gave her and her sister a dance on the previous 
evening, and how he took each in turn out on the 
waxed floor of her father’s oak-panelled hall, and 
how they tripped stately figures to the old times 
of Malbrook s'en va-t-en Guerre and Water Parted. 
She tells, too, that the young gentleman was met by 
footpads on his way home, and his purse and beauti¬ 
fully carved dress-sword taken, but that no harm was 
done him. And the great lady tells a pleasant joke 
as to how some young bloods of her acquaintance 
agreed to make an old man of their acquaintance 
drunk, and how well they succeeded in bringing his 
gray hairs to shame; and how there is to be a hang¬ 
ing soon, to which all the gay of the town will go. 
And the great Doctor is too much occupied with the 
succulent goose to take notice of this fashionable 
rattle. 

After dinner, which is washed down by much tea 
— at thirty shillings a pound, — and more wine, — 
the great lady’s sedan chair appears, for a yellow fog 
makes the city dark. The link-boys come, bearing 
torches, “ links,” and bending her head in order to 
enter the conveyance, she is borne away to wit- 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 159 

ness, after a chat with a friend, The Good-Natured 
Man. 

The Good-Natured Man proved to he too funny for 
the taste of the town. The play-goers, accustomed 
to very sentimental comedies, pronounced it “ low,” 
and no doubt our great lady was of that opinion, as 
she sat in the candle-lighted Covent Garden Thea¬ 
tre beside her husband, whose wig was very large, 
whose muff of fox-skin was almost as large, and 
whose snuff-box glittered with brilliants. This was 
on Friday, January 29, 1768, when Goldsmith had 
reached the age of forty. He was at the play in a 
new wig and a suit of “ purple bloom, satin grain, 
with garter blue silk breeches.” He received £500 
for the play, but whether this suit and the other, 
“ lined with silk and gold buttons,” were ever paid for, 
we are not sure. Goldsmith found it easy to give, 
but hard to pay. 

160. Goldsmith a Favorite.— He was overwhelmed 
with invitations. It must be admitted that he 
assumed airs at times, but they were innocent 
assumptions. He once said to his friend Beauclerc, 
that, “ although he was a doctor, he never prescribed 
for anybody but a few friends.” “ It would be bet¬ 
ter,” Beauclerc said, “ to prescribe for your enemies.” 
Johnson, who thundered speeches on all around him, 
as the giant Antaeus might have thundered at the 
pygmies, was very gentle to “ Goldy,” and Boswell 
preserves several speeches, in which Goldsmith, 


1G0 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


though a poor talker, had the best of the argument. 
One is the celebrated hit at Dr. Johnson’s pompous 
language. Goldsmith was telling the story of the 
petition of the little fishes to Jupiter. He saw that 
Johnson was laughing. 

“ Why, Dr. Johnson,” he said, “ this is not so easy 
as you seem to think; for, if you were to make little 
fishes speak, they would talk like Whales.” Dr. 
Johnson, who, as you may have guessed, was fond of 
eating, remarked that kidneys were “pretty little 
things,” but that one may eat a great many of them 
without being satisfied. “ Yes,” said Goldsmith, “ but 
how many of them would reach to the moon?” 
The autocrat does not know. “ Why, one , sir, if it 
were long enough.” Johnson, for once, was con¬ 
quered. “ Well, sir,” he said, “ I have deserved it; I 
should not have provoked so foolish an answer by so 
foolish a question.” 

Johnson, the big-hearted, the intolerant, the in¬ 
tolerable, was always loyal to Goldsmith, though 
he sometimes pounced on him in conversation. 
“Whether, indeed, we take Goldsmith as a poet, a 
comic-writer, or an historian,” he said emphatically, 
“ he stands first-class.” Posterity has endorsed this 
verdict so far as it touches the author of The Vicar of 
Wakefield's humor and poetry, but his histories are 
compilations of no value, except for their charming 
style. Like his History of Animated Nature , they 
were written for money. Ho man was more unfitted 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


161 


to write sucli a book than Goldsmith. It is full of 
the most amusing mistakes. He tells of talk¬ 
ing monkeys and other animals. “ He could tell a 
horse from a cow,” Dr. Johnson admitted, “ and beef 
from mutton when it was boiled.” Nevertheless, it 
brought him 800 guineas, nearly nine thousand dol¬ 
lars of our money. 

The Traveller showed Goldsmith’s loyalty of heart. 
Instead of selecting a wealthy and titled patron for 
the beautiful poem, he dedicated it to his brother, 
who was a “ poor parson,” rich, like his father, “ on 
forty pounds a year.” His heart, he says, 

“ Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain, 

And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.” 

In this poem occur several American names, for 
the first time perhaps in English literature; and in 
one line he makes a false quantity of “ Niagara ”: — 

“ Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, 

And Niagara stuns with thundering sound/’ 

161. Goldsmith’s next comedy was “ She Stoops to 
Conquer ”— a play which to-day is even more fresh 
and popular than when it was first produced. To 
read it with perfect enjoyment, one ought to have 
Harper’s edition with the wonderful illustrations by 
Abbey. The fashionable people of the town, who 
were coarse enough in their common speech and con¬ 
duct, found this comedy too comic, after the mawkish 

li 


162 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


sentimentality they were accustomed to. But it was 
too good not to succeed, and succeed it did. 

The most pathetic of all the poems of the eigh¬ 
teenth century, is The Deserted Village. It was the 
cry of an exile; the plaint of an Irish thrush pent 
in by dusty bars. How poor “Goldy,” wearied of 
work and of debt, longed for — 

“ The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade.” 

Oh, for a sight of the clear stream, where the 
water-cresses grew! Oh, for the homely sights and 
sounds! Like Wordsworth, in The Prelude, Gold¬ 
smith goes back to the days of his boyhood, and 
yearns to get close to Nature again. Wordsworth 
and Coleridge, the critics say, were the first English 
poets to unite the love of man and of nature in their 
poems, — to send away the false shepherds that, in 
classic guise, did duty for common English folk, to 
send their honest yeoman tramping through real 
fields and not through theatrical flowery meads, 
carrying myrtle and Cyprus. But this honor belongs 
to Goldsmith. As Pope was his pioneer in polished 
technique, he was Wordsworth’s in his sympathy for 
man and nature. Moreover, he is not condescending, 
as Wordsworth is when he treats the life of the com¬ 
mon people, nor is he self-conscious. The opening 
lines, hackneyed though they are, will never grow 
faded. 

The most graceful, the most really elegant of all 


THE AUGUSTAN AGE 


163 


the eighteenth-century writers was Oliver Goldsmith. 
He could not say, “No.” This was the principal 
fault of one of the most generous, most kindly 
humorous and sympathetic writers that ever existed. 
He died in 1774, unhappy, overwhelmed with debts, 
and despondent. 

162. The Drama. Restoration to Goldsmith. — The 

English Drama began to decay after the death of 
Shakspere. Puritanism killed it for a time; and 
when it arose on the restoration of Charles II. to 
the throne, it became a vehicle of coarseness and 
licentiousness. Actresses played for the first time 
in the theatres. Hitherto, the woman’s parts had 
been taken by boys. The playwriters stole from 
the French of Corneille, Racine, and Molikre, all 
but their morality. It is remarkable that, at this 
period, the French stage was moral, while the Eng¬ 
lish was unspeakably bad. William Wycherley 
(1640-1715) made clever, but licentious plays. 
William Congreve (1670-1729), Sir John Vanbrugh 
(1672-1726), and George Farquliar (1678-1707), 
were brilliant, sparkling, and grossly immoral. 
Dry den’s comedies unhappily deserve the regret he 
expresses for the same fault. The Duke of Buck¬ 
ingham ridiculed the heroic manner of his great 
epic-play, The Siege of Granada , in a burlesque 
called The Rehearsal. Nat Lee (1655-92) wrote 
the Rival Queens , a tragedy of some merit; Thomas 
Otway’s Venice Preserved and The Orphans are 


164 


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sometimes played, and Thomas Southern’s Fatal 
Marriage is still remembered. Mrs. Behn during 
the Restoration, and Mrs. Centlivre in the reign of 
Queen Anne showed that women could be as coarse 
as the worst of the men. Sir Richard Steele wrote 
The Lying Lover, a sentimental piece with a moral; 
Addison produced his tiresome Cato; Nicholas 
Rowe wrote cleanly, but his heroic plays are for¬ 
gotten. The Beggar's Opera, 1728, by Gay, was 
the prototype of Pinafore and The Mikado. Colley 
Cibber (time of George II.), Fielding, Foote, and 
Garrick, wrote light and amusing plays. Goldsmith’s 
She Stoops to Conquer and The Good-natured Man, 
and Sheridan’s Rivals and School for Scandal deserv¬ 
edly hold the stage still. 


CHAPTER XIII 


The Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. — Robert 

Burns , Wordsworth , Mangan, Aubrey De Vere 

163. The Hew Age. — “ With the new age,” says 
Mr. John Dennis, an acute and sympathetic critic, 
“ arose a fresh springtime of poetry, to be followed 
by a lovely summer. It was as if every bush was 
bursting into blossom, every bird into song, every 
flower in meadow and wood opening its eyes in the 
sunshine.” 

164. Robert Burns (1759-96) was the earliest of 
the poets of this “new age” He was a Scotch 
farmer, like his father, and he followed the plough 
for a living. He was not uneducated; he had ac¬ 
quired a little Latin, some Erencli, and a good 
knowledge of English Grammar. His first book of 
poems, Kilmarnock , was received with appreciation. 
Burns, though living until he was twenty-three the 
life of a Scotch peasant, had been educated by the 
influences of his time. He read the same books 
read by the most cultivated man in London. His 
reputation rests chiefly on his songs, which will live 
side by side with those of his melodious contempo- 


166 


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rary, Thomas Moore. Bums has been accused of 
irreligion; he does not scoff at religion, but only at 
the hypocritical professors of it. All of his poems 
are not moral; his life, in truth, was ruined by 
passions which he might have controlled. His songs 
Auld Lang Syne, John Anderson my Jo, A Red, Red 
Rose, A Man’s a Man for a’ That, and 0 Wert 
Thou in the Cauld Blast, are sung in all civilized 
countries. His best poems are in the Scottish dia¬ 
lect. Tam O’Slianter, a long poem, is in this dialect; 
the exquisite Cotter’s Saturday Night is not. He is 
justly placed among the greater poets of Europe. In 
A Bard’s Epitaph, he sadly describes himself: — 

“ Is there a man whose judgment clear, 

Can others teach the course to steer, 

Yet runs, himself, life’s mad career 
Wild as the wave ; 

Here pause — and, thro’ the starting tear, 

Survey this grave. 

“ The poor inhabitant below 
Was quick to learn, and wise to know, 

And keenly felt the friendly glow, 

And softer flame; 

But thoughtless follies laid him low, 

And stained his name. 

“ Reader, attend — whether thy soul 
Soars fancy’s flights beyond the pole, 

Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, 

In low pursuit; 

Know, prudent, cautious self-control 
Is wisdom’s root.” 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 167 


165. Thomas Percy (1729-1811), a bishop of the 
Church of England, collected his famous Beliques of 
Ancient English Poetry , consisting of old ballads. 
James Hogg, “ The Ettrick Shepherd” (1770-1835), 
wrote The Queen's Wake , in which occurs his sweet¬ 
est poem, Bonny Kilmeny. Hogg was a sheep- 
farmer ; but Sir Walter Scott discovered his genius. 
He left Selkirkshire, in Scotland, and went to Edin¬ 
burgh ; he was one of the projectors of Blackwood's 
Magazine. His poems are tender and fanciful; 
sometimes childish and extravagant. 

166. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was born in 
Glasgow; he published The Pleasures of Hope at 
the age of twenty-one. It was modelled on The 
Pleasures of Memory, by Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). 
This poem and O’Connor's Child are his best long 
poems, although some critics put Gertrude of Wyom¬ 
ing above the first. His ballads, Hohenlinden, The 
Battle of the Baltic, and The Exile of Erin, are justly 
cherished and admired. Campbell was buried in 
Westminster Abbey. Among other poets of this 
period were John Wilson (“ Christopher North ”), —• 
who wrote, in addition to the brilliant conversations 
called Nodes Ambrosiance, the poems, Isle of Palms 
and The City of the Plague, — and Arthur Hugh 
Clough, author of The Bothie. 

167. Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, in 1779. 
He was called the prince of song-writers, and he is 
certainly in the first rank of lyrical poets who have 


168 


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written in English. He began to write at the age of 
thirteen. He went to London in 1799, and at once 
became the pet of fashionable society. In 1803 he 
was made Admiralty Registrar at Bermuda, but he 
resigned this position to a deputy, and, after a tour in 
the United States and Canada, went back to England. 
At present Moore is as much underrated as a poet 
as he was overrated while he lived. He, of all 
English writers of songs, has only two equals, Burns 
and Shelley. He said, with truth, of Irish song: — 

“ Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee, 

The cold chain of silence had hung o’er thee long, 

When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee, 
And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song ! ” 

Lalla RooJch and The Loves of the Angels are still 
read, and the allusions to the Veiled Prophet are 
many: but they are not great poems. In fact, 
closely examined, they are the works of a scholar 
and a maker of pretty phrases rather than of a bard. 
His Odes to Anacreon and Little's Poems are unhap¬ 
pily blemished by immoral allusions. Lord Byron, 
in fact, whose Don Juan was condemned by moral 
taste, declared that Little's (Moore’s) Poems were 
more immoral. Moore writes many clever satires, of 
which The Fudge Family Abroad is the best. He 
wrote a Life of Byron, a History of Lreland. The 
Travels of an Lrish Gentleman in Search of a Relig¬ 
ion, and an admirable novel, The Epicurean. Moore 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING ICO 


was a Catholic, well instructed, and conscious of the 
value of his religion. It is a pity that he did not 
permit its influence to guide him more in his life and 
works. He was the most intimate friend of Lord 
Byron, and no doubt if Moore had been a consistent 
Catholic, Byron’s often expressed admiration for the 
Church would have become something more. He 
died at Sloperton, February 25, 1852, having seen 
his five children go before him. 

168. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was born a 
poet of a very high order; he made himself a bad 
man. No amount of admiration for his genius can 
blind us to his breaking every moral law. He has 
been called “ the poet’s poet.” Shelley is enthusias¬ 
tically admired by all who love poetry for the quali¬ 
ties that make it so entirely different from prose. 
Wordsworth, Byron, and Moore influenced Shelley, 
but he had an individuality most marked. Shelley 
is one of the poets whose writings are best appreciated 
by poets. Mr. Aubrey de Yere mentions Shelley’s 
Cenci as one of the greatest dramatic works of the 
present century. Its subject unhappily makes it 
unfit for general reading. Shelley is first of modern 
English lyrical writers. To a Skylark is exquisite in 
feeling and treatment. His most important poems 
are Queen Mab, Hellas , The Revolt of Islam , Witch of 
Atlas , Alastor, and Prometheus Unbound. 

169. John Keats (1795-1821) is another poet ol 
the poets. His life was sad and short. Deeply sen- 


170 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


sitive, his health, never very good, was shattered by 
the ferocious attacks of the critics on Endymion. 
These savage reviews appeared in the Quarterly 
Review , April, 1818, and in Blackwood’s Magazine , 
August, 1818. His Ode to a Nightingale and To a 
Grecian Urn should he read with Shelley’s Ode to 
the Skylark. Keats wrote an almost perfect sonnet, 
On Reading Chapman's Homer . Endymion begins 
with the famous lines: — 

“ A thing of beauty is a joy forever : 

Its loveliness increases ; it will never 

Pass into nothingness.” 

Although not a classical scholar, Keats expressed in 
Endymion the Greek spirit more sympathetically 
than any other English poet. The Eve of St. Agnes 
and The Pot of Basil are full of rich and poetical 
expressions. Keats does not inspire or ennoble; he 
simply satisfies a taste for beauty. He is not like a 
trumpet, calling to high actions; he is like a 
violoncello, soft, sweet, and rich. Keats died at the 
age of twenty-six, in 1821. 

170. Lord Byron (born Jan. 22, 1788, died April 
19, 1824) was a remarkable man and a poet of a 
high order. George Gordon, Lord Byron, produced 
an enormous amount of really good poetry in a short 
lifetime. Like Pope, Byron was a cripple; he was 
what is called “ club-footed ; ” and this, although he 
was one of the handsomest men of his time, helped 
to make him bitter. He became a man of fashion, 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 171 


while remaining a man of genius. From liis boyhood 
he was artificial and seemingly insincere; but at 
heart he was sincere enough. He needed only good 
influences to make him great. Of all English poets, 
he is most remarkable for versatility with strength, 
and artifice with fire. In spite of the immorality of 
Don Juan , he showed an earnest desire for higher 
things at times. Pope and Byron were not unlike 
in temperament; but Byron, while not as correct as 
Pope, was the greater poet. He could be as stinging 
in his satire as the older man, and as malicious. At 
the age of seventeen, Byron published his Hours of 
Idleness. It was ferociously mangled by the toma¬ 
hawk of the Edinburgh Review. His reply to this, 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers , gave him repu¬ 
tation ; but he left England and began Childe Har¬ 
old. On his return to England, in 1812, he published 
the first two cantos; “ he awoke and found himself 
famous.” Childe Harold more than repeated the 
successes made by Goldsmith’s Traveller. The town 
went wild about it. It was overrated at the time, as 
it is underrated now. The best part of it are the 
description of Nature — those of the thunderstorm 
and the ocean being really sublime. In Beppo, he 
struck a new vein, that of comedy; and a new form 
of verse, which he borrowed from the Italian. His 
serious poems The Giaour , Bride of Abydos , 
Mazeppa , The Corsair , Lara , and Parisina , are artifi¬ 
cial, insincere, and gloomy. His heroes are grand, 


172 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


weird, wicked creatures, who fancy they are heroic 
when they are only selfish. Socially he pretended 
to he an aristocrat, but at heart he was a democrat; 
he gave up his life for the liberties of Greece, and 
made it known in Europe that it was possible for a 
British lord to sympathize with the cause of the 
people. In 1815 he was married. In 1816, having 
separated from his wife, he left England, never to go 
back. After a residence in Switzerland, he went to 
Venice. Italy and Greece were the lands of his 
heart, though he was an Englishman by birth. His 
most important poems after Childe Harold are the 
Siege, of Corinth, Hebrew Melodies, Prometheus, Pris¬ 
oner of Chillon, Manfred, Prophecy of Dante, The 
Vision of Judgment, Lament of Tasso, Werner, The 
i* Deformed Transformed, and The Island. 

His dramas contain fine passages. Cain and 
Heaven and Earth he called “ mysteries,” in imita¬ 
tion of the miracle plays of the middle ages. They 
were held to be blasphemous by the public when 
they first appeared. Marino Faliero , The Two 
Foscari, and Sardanapalus are dramas of unequal 
value, though they contain beautiful passages. Byron 
died of fever, at the age of thirty-six, when helping 
the Greeks to gain liberty. Goethe admired him; 
he was great and little at the same time; had he 
been true to his better nature, he would have left 
no regrets for us when we enjoy the fervor of his 
Isles of Greece or the organ-music of his address to 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 173 


the ocean, or those exquisite lines beginning, “ Know 
you the Land where the cypress and myrtle,” which 
he paraphrased from Goethe. Byron was the first 
English poet, except Moore, to gain a universal 
reputation. 

171. Sir Walter Scott (born in Edinburgh, 1771; 
died at Abbotsford, 1832) holds a high place in 
poetical literature; but his best work is found in 
his novels. Scott took to prose when the meteoric 
Byron arose. Before that time, his romances in 
verse, his lyrics and ballads had made him famous. 
He was the first writer of the romantic school. His 
spirit loved the atmosphere of the middle ages; he 
revelled in tournaments, pageants, and the clash of 
arms. It is easy to believe that some of his most 
stirring poems were composed on horseback, for they 
have the motion of the gallop in their rhythm and 
rhyme. Walter Scott began life as a lawyer, follow¬ 
ing his father’s profession; but he dropped it for 
literature, publishing in 1799 a translation of 
Goethe’s romantic poem, Gotz von Berlichingen. He 
produced The Lay of the Last Minstrel , 1805, Mar- 
mion, 1808, The Lady of the Lake, 1810, Don Rod¬ 
erick, 1811, Triermain and Rokeby, 1813. The Lord 
of the Lsles, 1815, and Harold the Dauntless, 1817, 
were printed after his first successful novel, Wavcrley, 
appeared. A few minor poems, including the Fare¬ 
well to the Muse (1822), ended his poetical works. 
We have to regret that this noble-natured man, whose 


174 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


genius was so virile and sincere, should have, through 
ignorance of Catholic practices, disfigured Marmion 
with the absurd episode of the buried nun. The 
influence that made Sir Walter the poet of romance 
came from Goethe and the Germans, as well as from 
the Celts. Like the North, he was “tender and 
true.” His life and works were those of a manly 
man — chaste, noble, honest. 

172. William Wordsworth, born April 7, 1770, 
in the Cumberland Highlands, in England, left a 
great mass of beautiful poetry and a few common¬ 
place verses. Wordsworth will never be a popular 
poet until the great crowd of the people learn to 
value thought rather than sentiment. Like Milton, 
Wordsworth accepted his mission to write and was 
consciously a poet. He believed that he was a 
teacher, and his duties were summed up in these 
noble words: “ To console the afflicted; to add sun¬ 
shine to daylight by making the happy happier; to 
teach the young and the gracious of every age to 
see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more 
securely virtuous.” Wordsworth loved nature; he 
studied the sky, the lakes, the woods, the fields, as 
closely and with as much love as the child studies 
the face of its mother. Thomson, the author of 
The Seasons, and Burns and Gray and Cowper had 
this great love for nature, too; but not in the degree 
possessed by William Wordsworth. The French 
Revolution was an outbreak of hatred, — a reign of 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 175 


terror and a rain of blood; it was as well the sun¬ 
dering of artificial forms which had begun to rule 
too much the life of men. Wordsworth saw only 
the good done by this upheaval. He was the first 
conscious poet of the common people. Up to his 
time, readers of poetry seemed to think that there 
was no beauty in the lives of the poor. 

Wordsworth had a different opinion; he saw that 
greatness and pathos, and all high virtues existed as 
well by the peasant’s hearth as in the palace of the 
prince. His early poems, inspired by his belief in 
his mission as a teacher, were received with deri¬ 
sion. The storm of ridicule that killed Keats only 
seemed to make Wordsworth stronger. “ He claimed 
for Lucy Gray ,” Mr. R. W. Church says, “ for the 
‘miserable mother by the Thorn] for the desolate 
maniac nursing her infant, the same pity which we 
give to Lear and Cordelia or * to the dark sorrows of 
the line of Thebes.’ ” 1 

Wordsworth, having taken his degree at Cam¬ 
bridge, went to France full of enthusiasm for the 
Revolution. Its horrors drove him home again. 
He changed his political opinions and ceased to 
apologize for the furies of murder and irreligion. In 
1793 he published his first volume of poems, and in 
1798 appeared the first volume of Lyrical Ballads, to 
which Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner. 
Coleridge and he went to Germany together; he 

1 Sophocles. 


176 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


lived for some time at Grasmere with his sister. 
After his marriage, in 1802, he settled at Rydal 
Mount, in that lovely lake-country which he made 
famous; he was the best of the “lake” school of 
poets. His principal philosophical poems are The 
Prelude (1805) in which he shows the working of his 
own mind, and The Excursion (1814). He wrote 
many sonnets, inspired by passing events, Scorn 
not the sonnet , and The world is too much with us 
are among the best sonnets in the English language. 
The latter is merely the expression of a mood, and 
Wordsworth did not intend it to be taken in an un¬ 
christian sense. His famous lines to the Blessed 
Virgin, Our tainted nature's solitary boast , would 
alone make us love this great poet, if he had not 
a hundred other claims to our affection. His words, 
like Shakspere’s, have become part of our language. 
How many times have these lines from the Ode to 
Immortality been quoted : — 

“ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home.” 

Lucy and Lucy Gray are household poems; so, 
also, are The Sea Shell and She was a Phantom of 
Delight , in which are the well-known lines : — 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 177 

“A perfect woman, nobly planned, 

To warn, to comfort, and command; 

And yet a spirit still, and bright 
With something of angelic light.” 

Everybody knows, or ought to know, the sonnet, 
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room . 

Wordsworth’s long poems have long patches of 
pompous and uninteresting writing in them; so have 
Milton’s and Dryden’s and Browning’s. Shakspere 
even has passages that seem almost foolish to mod¬ 
ern ears; but Wordsworth will.be more and more 
appreciated as years go by and people learn more 
and more to love peace and nobility of thought ex¬ 
pressed in noble language. Wordsworth did for the 
English peasant what Millet, in his picture, The 
Angelus , has done for his French brother ; he showed 
that coarse clothes and hard labor do not separate 
in heart the rich and the poor. He died at Rydal 
Mount, April 23, 1850. His only attempt to write 
a drama was The Borderers (1796). It was a failure. 
His Ode to Immortality is one of the greatest lyrics 
in the English language. 

173. Aubrey de Vere is naturally suggested by 
the name of Wordsworth. The father of this great 
poet, Sir Aubrey de Vere, shared with his son the 
friendship and admiration of Wordsworth. Sir 
Aubrey de Yere’s highest achievement was his 
tragedy Mary Tudor , which is one of the few mag¬ 
nificent plays written in modern times. The son- 
12 


178 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


nets of Sir Aubrey de Yere were warmly praised by 
Wordsworth as the “ most perfect of our age.” In 
England, the eldest son of a baronet inherits the 
title; therefore Sir Stephen de Yere, well known by 
his admirable translations from Homer, is the 
present baronet. Aubrey de Yere is his younger 
brother, the third son of Sir Aubrey, who died in 
1846. 

Aubrey de Yere was born January 10, 1814. He 
has led a life suitable to a poet, at his home, Cur- 
ragh Chase, near Adare, in Ireland. He says, “ I 
became a Catholic, in 1851; a blessing for which I 
feel more grateful every successive year.” He has 
been a voluminous writer both in prose and poetry. 
His prose works are English Misrule and Irish Mis¬ 
deeds (1848), Picturesque Sketches of Greece and 
Turkey (1859 Ireland’s Church Property and Right 
Use of It (1867), Pleas for Secularization (1867), 
The Church Settlement of Ireland (1868), Constitu¬ 
tional and Unconstitutional Political Action (1881), 
Essay Chiefly on Poetry (1887), and Essays , Literary 
and Critical (1889). The last two are the most val¬ 
uable of his prose works; they are a mine of good 
principles, fine, aesthetic teaching, and the high 
literary art. 

174. Alexander the Great and St. Thomas of Canter¬ 
bury, both dramatic poems, are masterpieces. Ten¬ 
nyson’s efforts at the production of a tragedy are 
dwarfed by the masterly work of his contemporary 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 179 


poet. De Yere has written the most mighty drama 
since Shakspere or Dry den. This is Alexander the 
Great If it had been done by an actor, like Shakspere 
it would he familiar to the people at large ; it would 
be popular. At present, it is known to comparatively 
few ; but its reputation grows every year. Another 
masterpiece is De Vere’s St Thomas of Canterbury} 
It is a wonderful piece of dramatic art, at once sub¬ 
lime and human, and absolutely true to nature and 
to history. Tennyson, the greatest of modern poets 
in so many departments of his art, failed when he 
tried to write tragedy. But Aubrey De Yere stands 
alone as the only modern poet who has produced a 
grand tragedy. Like Dry den’s Almanzor and Alma- 
hide, it is not arranged for acting. His tragedies are 
the work of a man of genius. 

Aubrey De Yere’s May Carols, The Search after 
Proserpine, Poems, Miscellaneous and Sacred Irish 
Odes and Other Poems, The Legends of St. Patrick, 
Legends of the Saxon Saints, The Foray of Queen 
Meave, and Legends and Records of the Church and 
the Empire — have all poetic merit. The time has 
now come for sifting the didactic element from these 
verses, which glitter with pure gems of poetry. Au¬ 
brey de Yere is not a great lyrist; but as a writer 
of tragedies he is the greatest of our time; he is a 
giant among lesser sages; the poetic traditions of 

1 For a contrast between this drama and Tennyson’s Bccket , see 
Dr. Eagan’s Lectures. (W. H. Sadlier & Co.) 


180 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Shakspere and Dryden are his; and each day brings 
a more general recognition of this fact. 

175. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in 1772, is best 
known to the general public by his weird and unique 
poems, the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Christabel 
(1816). Coleridge was undoubtedly a man of genius, 
injured by disease. He was unhappily an opium 
eater. His Kubla Khan seems like a nightmare. 
He was learned, a keen student of the English 
language and of nature, but unbalanced. His prose 
is confined mostly to boggy questions of German 
Metaphysics; his papers on Shakspere are remark¬ 
able. He wrote by fits and starts, but talked, always 
with his eyes shut, constantly and brilliantly. Of 
him the story is told that once meeting a friend he 
began a most exhaustive lecture, holding the button 
of his friend’s coat in his hand. The friend cut off 
the button and disappeared — Coleridge remained 
in the street, talking, with the button in his hand. 
Coleridge was the first of the later school of poets 
called the Pre-Raphaelites, to whom he gave their 
keynote in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , and 
Christabel. Probably the lines from the latter poem 
most often quoted are: — 

“ Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; 

And whispering tongues can poison truth; 

And constancy lives in realms above ; 

And life is thorny ; and youth is vain ; 

And to be wroth with one we love, 

Doth work like madness in the brain.’’ 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 181 

176. Wordsworth and Coleridge were close friends, 
though as different in genius as Christabel is from 
The Prelude. Coleridge went back into the past — 
a dreamy, romantic past for him — and saw life as a 
vision that had some qualities of a nightmare. He 
died in 1834. 

177. Robert Southey, born in 1774, was made poet- 
laureate in 1813. He wrote many prose works, his 
Life of Nelson being the only one that lives. Of his 
poems, Joan of Arc was written at the age of nine¬ 
teen ; it is his worst. Roderic (1814), a chronicle 
of Moorish conquest in Spain, is his best. It is pic¬ 
turesque, elevated, and artistic. His other important 
poems are Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), The Curse 
of Kehama (1810), and A Vision of Judgment 
(1821). He died in 1843. His reputation becomes 
less with years. 

178. Minor Poets are Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures 
of Memory (1793); Leigh Hunt, The Story of 
Rimini (1816); and Thomas Love Peacock, Rho- 
dodaphne (1818). Walter Savage Landor is best 
known by Count Julian. Bryan Waller Procter, 
father of Adelaide Procter, lives in his 

“ The Sea ! the Sea ! the open Sea ! 

The blue, the fresh, the ever free ! ” 

Ebenezer Elliott, by his sonnet on The Three Marys. 
Hartley Coleridge, son of Samuel Coleridge, is one 
of the better poets still loved and read. 

179. William Motherwell is remembered only by 


182 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


his beautiful ballad, Jeanie Morrison. Thomas 
Lovell Beddoes, who died in 1849, was an imitator 
of the most gloomy of the Elizabethan dramatists; 
his Death's Jest Book is full of horrors. Sydney 
Dobell’s Balder is rich, tropical, incomplete, .poetical. 
Charles Kingsley, whose falsely historical novel, 
Hypatia , is well known, wrote some interesting bal¬ 
lads, The Three Tybees and The Sands of Dee. 

180. Thomas Hood (born in 1799, died in 1845) 
still holds a large place in public favor; his Dream 
of Eugene Aram, The Song of the Shirt, and The 
Bridge of Sighs, are among “ the songs of the 
people.” Lord Macaulay, the historian, left some 
ringing ballads, whose metrical value ought not to 
be underrated. Winthrop Mackworth Praed was 
the predecessor of Austin Dobson and his school of 
clever poets, delicate, fanciful, polished, and light. 
Mr. Dobson has written charming poems, reviving 
the French poetical forms of the rondeau , ballade, 
and triolet. 

181. Matthew Arnold’s poems (1822-1888) have 
great merit, but he was first of all a prose writer. 
His Thyrsis has been much praised. He lacked 
Faith, and consequently Hope. The same may be 
said of Arthur Hugh Clough. Clough, knowing no 
Christ, is painfully gloomy. His Long Vacation 
Exercise is an interesting exercise in hexameters; 
he had great talent. 

182. The Brownings, Robert and Elizabeth, occu- 


ROBERT BURNS TO BROWNING 183 


pied much space in the literary chronicles of the 
nineteenth century. Elizabeth Browning was the 
strongest, most fervid of women poets. Her dic¬ 
tion is rich, her metre careless, as are her rhymes; 
her view of Italian politics possible only to a woman 
who knew only one side of those politics. She 
lives in Aurora Leigh (1856). Robert Browning, 
her husband, who died in 1889, has not yet been 
permanently placed in the galaxy of the poets. 
That he was a true poet, there can be no doubt; 
but whether he is a constellation or only a minor 
star, all critics have not decided. Some of his 
poems deserve the epithet “ magnificent.” It seems 
strange that such a keen-sighted and scholarly man 
should have so little understood the Catholic side 
of Italian history or the minds of Catholics. Brown¬ 
ing is popularly known by his ballad, How they 
Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix. It is 
vulgar to laugh merely because others laugh, and 
this may be applied to many of the ignorant critics 
of Browning. He is a very great poet, and his 
claim to recognition is more reverently acknowledged 
every year by a growing number of the discerning. 
The best edition of his Poetic and Dramatic Works 
is printed by Houghton and Mifflin in six volumes. 
It includes of course, the play A Blot in the ’ Scutch¬ 
eon, , the most incomprehensible of his poems, Bordello , 
and the sublime Grammarian’s Funeral. 


CHAPTER XIY 


Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. — Lord Tennyson 

183. Lord Tennyson was a great English poet, 
but not the greatest of English poets. His influence 
on the life and literature of our time was immense. 
He at once expressed and reflected the spirit of our 
century, although of late there has been a percep¬ 
tible move against his teachings, or rather his 
ideals. A literary generation that adores Rudyard 
Kipling cannot be expected to admire the purity 
and delicacy of a poet who never fails to throw all 
the light of a glorious art around truth, purity, and 
duty. 

184. King Arthur is too ideal, too pure, for tastes 
formed by realism, and the readers of novels which 
depend for their success on sensationalism find 
Tennyson’s exquisite pictures of nature without 
interest. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth and 
Byron. While Woodsworth was serene, a painter 
of nature, Byron was the opposite. He was popular, 
while Wordsworth, whom the world is now only 
beginning to acknowledge, was neglected; so that, 


LORD TENNYSON 


135 


strange as it may seem at first, Tennyson’s im¬ 
mediate progenitor was Lord Byron. Byron’s popu¬ 
larity was great while he lived; young men quoted 
him, wore wide and turned-down collars, assumed 
a pirate-like look and an appearance of wickedness 
which were supposed to be Byronic. This genera¬ 
tion passed away, or rather grew older, and the 
younger people became Tennysonian. They were 
sentimental; hut they did not affect Byronic des¬ 
peration or mysterious wickedness. 

185. “Locksley Hall.” — In Locksley Hall the 
hero sighs and moans, and calls Heaven’s vengeance 
down on his ancestral roof because a young girl has 
refused to marry him ; because his cousin Amy mar¬ 
ries another man, he goes into a paroxysm of poetry 
and denunciation and prophecy. But as Shak- 
spere says, “ Many men have died, but not for 
love.” And the hero of Locksley Hall lives to 
write in a calmer style a good many years later. 
Maud, another famous poem, like Locksley Hall, 
shows something of the influence of Byron. It 
is a love story too, broken, incoherent, but very 
poetical. 

After Locksley Hall and Maud, the influence of 
Byron on Tennyson seems to grow less. 

186. In studying the poetry of poets, it is a wise 
thing to study the influence of poets upon it. The 
young Tennyson’s favorite poet was Thomson, — he 
of the serene and gentle Seasons. Alfred Tennyson 


186 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


was born at Somersby in Lincolnshire, England, on 
August 6, 1809. He began to write stories when 
he was very young. He wrote chapters of unending 
novels which he put, day after day, under the potato 
bowl on the table. Miss Thackeray says that one 
of these, which lasted for months, was called The 
Old Horse. She gives this account of his first 
poem: 

187. “Alfred’s first verses, so I have heard him 
say, were written upon a slate which his brother 
Charles put into his hands one Sunday at Louth, 
when all the elders of the party were going to 
church, and the child was left. Charles gave him 
a subject — the flowers in the garden; and when 
he came back from church little Alfred brought the 
slate to his brother, covered with written lines of 
blank verse. They were made on the models of 
Thomson’s Seasons , the only poetry he had ever 
read. One can picture it all to one’s self, the flowers 
in the garden, the verses, the little poet with waiting 
eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. 
‘Yes, you can write,’ said Charles, and he gave 
Alfred back the slate.” 

188. His Elegy. — There is another story that 
his grandfather asked him to write an elegy on his 
grandmother. When it was written, the old gentle¬ 
man gave the boy ten shillings, saying: “There, 
that is the first you have ever earned by your poetry, 
and, take my word for it, it will be your last.” 


LORD TENNYSON 


187 


This Charles, who admitted that Alfred could 
write, became a very sweet poet himself as years 
went on. The poet of Alfred’s first love was the 
calm and pleasant Thomson. Later, as he grew 
towards manhood, he read Byron, then the fashion. 
He scribbled in the Byronic strain. How strong a 
hold Byron’s fiery verse had taken on the boy’s mind 
is shown by his own confession. When Alfred was 
about fifteen, the news came that Byron was dead. 
“ I thought the whole world was at an end,” he said. 
“ I thought everything was over and finished for 
every one — that nothing else mattered. I remem¬ 
ber I walked out alone and carved ‘ Byron is dead ’ 
into the sandstone.” Although Locksley Hall and 
Maud show Byronic reflections, yet they were not 
the earliest published of Tennyson’s poems. 

189. The Poet’s Life. — His life was placid, serene, 
pleasant. At home he was in one of the sweetest 
spots in England; at college he lived among con¬ 
genial friends, and his after-life was the ideal life 
of a poet. The premature death of his friend, 
Arthur Hallam, — to which we owe the magnificent 
poem, In Memoriam, — was the first sad event that 
came to him. Longfellow, his great contemporary, 
was also happy. And just before the tragic death 
of his wife, — she was burned to death, — a friend 
passing his cottage said: “I fear change for Long¬ 
fellow, for any change must be for the worse.” 

And this is the drop of bitterness that must tinge 


188 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


all our happiness in this world — the thought that 
most changes must be for the worse. But changes 
that came to Tennyson brought him more praise, 
more honor, until people began to say that the 
laureate could only mar the monument he had made 
for himself by trying to add too many ornaments 
to it. 

190. His First Volume. — In his first volume, 
published fifty-nine years ago, he showed to the 
world a series of delicately tinted portraits of ladies : 
Claribel, Lilian, Isabel, Mariana, Madeline, Adeline ; 
and his gorgeous set of pictures in arabesque, Recol¬ 
lections of the Arabian Nights, Love and Death , and 
The Dying Swan. 

The appearance of this volume was not hailed as 
a revelation by the reading public. And indeed 
there was little in it to indicate the poet of The 
Idyls of the King, of The Princess, and of In 
Memoriam, except a fineness of art which no Eng¬ 
lish poet has yet surpassed or even equalled. If 
Airy, Fairy Lilian is like a cherry stone minutely 
carved, yet Tennyson was the first poet to show how 
delicately such work could be done. If Mariana 
in the Moated Grange is only an exercise in sweet 
notes, what bard ever drew such exquisitely modu¬ 
lated tones from his lyre before ? If it is “ a little 
picture painted well,” where was the poet since 
Shakspere who could have painted the picture so 
well? The Owl, though many laughed at it, had 


LORD TENNYSON 189 

something of the quality of Shakspere’s snatches 
of song. 

191. Byron’s Influence.— There was not a trace of 
Byron in this utterance. The poet who had won the 
prize offered by Cambridge for English poetry, in 
1829, and who somewhat earlier had seemed in 
despair over the death of Byron, did not utter fierce 
heroics. He painted pictures with a feeling for art 
that was new in literature. How this wonderful 
technical nicety struck the sensitive young readers 
of the time, Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us in 
The Victorian Poets : — 

“ It is difficult now to realize how chaotic was the 
notion of art among English verse-makers at the begin¬ 
ning of Tennyson’s career. Not even the example of 
Keats had taught the needful lesson, and I look upon 
his successor’s early efforts as of no small importance. 
These were dreamy experiments in metre and word-paint¬ 
ing, and spontaneous after their kind. Readers sought 
not to analyze their meaning and grace. The significance 
of art has since become so well understood, and such 
results have been attained, that Claribel , Lilian , The 
Merman, The Dying Swan , seem slight enough to us 
now; and even then the affectation pervading them, which 
was merely the error of a poetic soul groping for its true 
form of expression, repelled men of severe and established 
tastes; but to the neophyte they had the charm of sigh¬ 
ing winds and babbling waters, a wonder of luxury and 
weirdness, inexpressible, not to be effaced.” 


190 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


192. Poetry as an Art.— It was evident that Ten¬ 
nyson regarded poetry as an art. It was evident 
that this art was one that needed constant and per¬ 
sistent cultivation. It was evident that, deprived as 
he was of the material color of the painter, he was 
determined to make words flash, jewel-like, to make 
them burn in crimson, or to convey with all the 
vividness of a Murillo, tints,— not only the color, 
but the tints ,— of the sky, the earth, even of the 
atmosphere itself. 

Let us take Mariana, suggested by the song in 
Shakspere’s Twelfth Night Look at the picture. 
The subject is that of a woman waiting in a country- 
house surrounded by a moat. It is a simple subject, 
not a complex or many-sided one. See how Tennyson 
gets as near color as words can. We may be sure 
that he cast and recast that poem many times 
before he printed it. 

“ With blackest moss the flower plots 
Were thickly crusted, one and all ; 

The rusted nails fell from the knots 

That held the peach to the garden wall. 

The broken sheds looked sad and strange, 

Unlifted was the clinking latch ; . 

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
Upon the lonely moated grange. 

“All day within the dreamy house, 

The doors upon their binges creak’d ; 

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse 
Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked. 

Or from the crevice peered about.’* 


LORD TENNYSON 


191 


Millet, in The Angelus, depicted sound by the 
magic of his brush, which had the potent spell of 
color. Similarly, Tennyson, in Mariana , overleaped 
the limitations of his art, and painted in words both 
color and sound. 

Notice, too, how careful is his choice of epithets in 
this early book. He asks : 

“ Wherefore those faint smiles of thine, 

Spiritual Adeline ? ” 

193. Tennyson’s Taste.— You will never find a 
fault of taste in Tennyson; and if you should find a 
trochee where you expected an iambus, be sure it is 
there because the musician willed a discord. At the 
age of twenty-two, he published the volume containing 
The Lady of Shalott CEnone, Lady Clara Vere de 
Vere, The May Queen , The Miller's Daughter , The 
Palace of Art, Of Old sat Freedom on the Heights , 
and half a dozen others equally famous, equally 
exquisite, and all showing an advance in power over 
his first volume, and also a decrease in affectation. 

The Lady of Shalott is an allegory,— for Tennyson, 
like all English poets from Chaucer down, is fond of 
allegories. In The Ijady of Shalott we have the first 
hint of the poem we now know as Elaine. 

194. “ The Lady of Shalott ” represents poetry, one 
of the helps to the intellectual progress of man. 
But, to remain strong and spiritual, poetry must be 
pure. It must not become worldly or earthly. It 


192 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


must weave its web high above the sordid aims of 
sin. And so the Lady of Shalott worked. 

" There she weaves by night and day. 

A magic Web with colors gay, 

She has heard a whisper say 
A curse is on her if she stay 
To look down to Camelot, 

She knows not what the curse may be 
And so she weaveth steadily, 

And little other care hath she, 

The Lady of Shalott.” 

But after a time this wonderful lady, who weaves 
into her web for the solace and delight of man all the 
sights that pass her as shadows, is tempted to go 
down from her spiritual height. She yields to the 
temptation and dies. In this allegory we find the 
germ of Elaine, “ the lily maid of Astolat.” 

195. “ English Idyls.”—In 1842 his third volume 
appeared. It was called English Idyls and Other 
Poems. This was the glorious fruition of a spring¬ 
time which had caught and garnered all the fresh 
beauty of the opening year. The April and May of 
the poet’s first poems had ripened into June, and the 
June, azure-skied, rich, blooming, gave promise of 
even greater loveliness. 

In The Lady of Shalott we found the hint of 
Elaine. In this new volume we find studies for the 
great symphony to come — that English epic which 
is the poet’s masterpiece. In this volume is that 
Homeric fragment — the Morte d'Arthur —which is 


LORD TENNYSON 


193 


one of the finest passages ever written in any lan¬ 
guage. Dante never wrote anything more sustained 
in strength, more heroic in style, more reticent in 
expression and deeper in feeling than 

“ So all day long the noise of battle rolled.” 

But, to be logical, we must not consider the Morte 
d’Arthur here. In its place in this third volume it 
is really out of place. It belongs at the end of the 
completed Idyls, all of which we have now. But, in 
1842 the world had only hints of them; in the third 
volume the most portentous hint was the Morte 
d’Arthur. There were others — St. Agnes , Sir 
Galahad , Sir Lancelot, and Guinevere. 

196. Tennyson’s Love for Home. — Looking through 
this third volume, you will find all the characteristics 
of the poet. Not only in the use of words carried 
to the highest point, the development of a fashion 
of blank verse which is as much Tennysonian as 
Spenser’s verse is Spenserian, and a love for classic 
forms and allusions; but in a great love for English 
landscapes, English country life, English modes of 
speech, and English institutions. Above all, whether 
the poet tells us a Saxon legend, like that of Godiva ; 
a rustic idyl, like The Gardener's Daughter ; a modern 
story, like Dora ; or a Middle-age legend, like The 
Beggar Maid, — there permeates all his verse a 
reverence for womanhood and purity and nobility of 
principle which is characteristic of all his work and 

13 


194 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


all his moods. This is one reason why women love 
Tennyson’s poetry; for women are quicker than 
men to appreciate the pure and the true in literature. 
It is to Tennyson more than to any other man that 
we owe the elevation and purity of most of the 
public utterances of the nineteenth century. He, 
more than any living writer, has both influenced 
and been influenced by his time. He is intensely 
modern. He is of the Victorian age as Shakspere 
was of the Elizabethan age. In truth, as Ben Jonson 
and Shakspere were representative of the spirit of 
their time, so Tennyson is the exponent of his. 
When he is highest, he is a leader; when lowest, 
a follower. He is reverential to Christianity; in 
the case of his most important work, The Idyls of 
the King , he is almost Catholic in his spirit; but 
still “all his mind is clouded with a doubt.” 

197. “ In Memoriam.” — Tennyson’s doubt is evi¬ 
dent even in that solemn and tender dirge, In 
Memoriam, which formed his fifth volume, pub¬ 
lished a year after The Princess , in 1850. The 
Greek poet, Moschus, wrote an elegy on his friend 
Bion, and the refrain of this elegy, “ Begin, Sicilian 
Muses, begin the lament,” is famous. Tennyson, 
this modern poet, possessed of the Greek passion 
for symmetry and influenced as much by Theocritus, 
Moschus, and Bion as by the spirit of his own time, 
has made an elegy on his friend as solemn, as stately, 
as perfect in its form as that of Moschus; but not so 


LORD TENNYSON 


195 


spontaneous and tender. It is not a poem of Faith, 
nor is it a poem of doubt; but Faith and doubt tread 
in each other’s footsteps. Instead of the divine 
certitude of Dante, we have a doubting half-belief. 
Tennyson loves the village church, the holly-wreathed 
baptismal font, the peaceful vicarage garden, the 
comfortable vicar, because they represent serenity 
and order. He detests revolution. If he lived, 
before the coming of Christ, in the vales of Sicily, 
he would probably have hated to see the rural 
sports of the pagans disturbed by the disciples of a 
less picturesque and natural religion. His belief is 
summed up in these words (liv.) : 

“Behold, we know not anything; 

I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last — far off—at last, to all, 

And every winter change to spring. 

“ So runs my dream : but what am I ? 

An infant crying in the night: 

An infant crying for the light: 

And with no language but a cry.” 

He believes in the immortality of the soul, and 
yet — to use again the words he puts into the mouth 
of his own King Arthur — “ all his mind is clouded 
with a doubt.” He says (xxxiv.): 

“ My own dim life should teach me this, 

That life shall live for evermore ; 

Else earth is darkness at the core, 

And dust and ashes all that is; 


196 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ This round of green, this orb of flame, 

Fantastic beauty; such as lurks 
In some wild poet, when he works 
Without a conscience or an aim. 

“ What then were God to such as I ? 

’T were hardly worth my while to choose 
Of things all mortal, or to use 
A little patience ere I die ; 

“ *T were best at once to sink to peace, 

Like birds the charming serpent draws, 

To drop head foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease.” 

But he is possessed by the restlessness of our 
time. He does not proclaim aloud that Christ lives; 
he looks on the faith of his sister with reverence, but 
he does not participate in it; his highest hope is that 
a new time will bring the faith that comes of self- 
control and that the “ Christ that is to be ” will come 
with the new year. To be frank, the Christianity of 
Tennyson seems to be little more tangible than the 
religion of George Eliot. He seems to hold that 
Christianity is good so far because no philosopher 
can offer the world anything better. Between the 
burning faith of Dante and the languid sympathy of 
Tennyson, the gulf is great. So much for the most 
noble elegy of our century, which needs only a touch 
of the faith and fire of Dante to make it the grand¬ 
est elegy of all time. Arthur Hallam, the subject 
of the In Memoriam , had been Tennyson’s dearest 
friend; he was engaged to marry the poet’s sister. 


LORD TENNYSON 


197 


“ He was,” Tennyson himself said, in later years, “ as 
perfect as mortal man could be.” In Memoriam 
was a sincere tribute of love and genius to goodness 
and talent. Regret as we may the absence of that 
Christian certitude which can alone point upward 
unerringly from the mists of doubt, yet we must 
rejoice that the nineteenth century brought forth 
from the chaos of Byronic utterances and the pretty 
rhetorical paper-flower gardens of Rogers and Camp¬ 
bell a poem so pure in spirit and so pure in form. 

198. Tennyson’s Lyrics. — Before considering The 
Idyls of the King , that grand and exquisite epic, 
which combines the ideal of Christian chivalry with 
the perfection of modern expression, I must call 
your attention to Tennyson’s lyrics, especially to the 
little songs scattered through The Princess. There 
is one lyric, not in The Princess , which must live 
forever. And when you ask “ Why ? ” I can only 
say it is poetry. No man has ever yet exactly 
defined what poetry is. But if any man should ask 
for illustrations of the most evanescent quality in 
poetry — that quality which is utterly incapable of 
being defined, one might point to the Break, Break, 
Break, of Tennyson and Longfellow’s Bainy Day. 
Tennnyson’s expression of the inexpressible— Ten¬ 
nyson’s crystallization of a mood — is perfect. 

“Break, break, break, 

On thy cold, gray stones, 0 Sea, 

And would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


198 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“O well for the fisherman’s hoy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play, 

O well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay 1 

“ And the stately ships go on 

To their haven under the hill; 

But 0 for the touch of a vanished hand, 

And the sound of a voice that is still! 

“ Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea, 

But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me.” 

199. Tennyson's Epic. — We owe The Idyls of the 
King to the fact that Alfred Tennyson read and 
pondered over Sir Thomas Malory’s old black-letter 
legends of King Arthur’s Round Table. Here he 
found the story of his epic ready-made. In the 
form he adopted, we find the influence of Theocritus, 
who seems, of all poets who wrote in Greek, to have 
most influenced him. The title of his epic poem 
Tennyson took from Theocritus. The Idyls of Theo¬ 
critus are short pastoral poems, full of sweetness, 
tenderness, and love of rural life. In these qualities, 
Theocritus and Tennyson are much in sympathy. 
Theocritus was born about two hundred and eighty- 
four years before the birth of Our Lord. His songs 
are of Sicilian woods and nightingales, of the musi¬ 
cal contests of shepherds. In Tennyson’s CEnone , 
we find many traces of Theocritus, .even paraphrases 
on him. Godiva is formed on an idyl of Theocritus, 


LORD TENNYSON 


199 


and his famous lullaby is suggested by Theocritus’ 
song of Alcmena over the infant Hercules. 

Carlyle did not approve of Tennyson’s reflections 
of the Greek. And he expressed it in his pleasant 
way — “ See him on a dust-hill surrounded by in¬ 
numerable dead dogs.” The term “Idyl,” though 
applicable enough to the light and pastoral poems of 
Theocritus was hardly so appropriate to the various 
parts of the Arthurian epic. But Tennyson has 
made the title his own; we love The Idyls of the 
King by the name he has re-created for them. 

The Idyls are now complete. Though scattered 
through several volumes, we now have them ar¬ 
ranged in good editions in logical sequence. They 
follow each other in this order: The Coming of 
Arthur, Gareth and Lynette, Enid, Balin and 
Balan , Vivien , Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and 
Ettarre , The Last Tournament , Guinevere , and The 
Passing of Arthur. 

200. The Allegory in the “Idyls.” — The Idyls of 
the King is an allegory, as well as an epic. It 
carries a great moral lesson. It is an epic of a 
failure, — a failure which falls on King Arthur and 
his knights because of the sin that crept among 
them like a serpent and left its trail over all. 
Arthur, the ideal king, the chivalrous servant of 
Christ, seems to represent the spiritual life. His 
queen Guinevere is “ sense at war with soul.” She 
loves the things of earth better than those of heaven. 


200 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


And from lier betrayal of the King — her fall, like 
that of The Lady of Shalott — her sinful love for 
Sir Lancelot, who represents the pride of the flesh 
— flow all the many evils that fall on the court of 
King Arthur. It is true that the allegorical mean¬ 
ing in some of the Idyls is dimmer than in others. 
Sometimes it seems to disappear altogether. 1 

The Coming of Arthur is the first Idyl. King 
Arthur seems to typify the soul. There is a dispute 
about Arthur. The King Leodogran will not give 
Arthur, the knight who has saved him, his daughter 
Guinevere, until he is satisfied about Arthur’s birth. 
Some say he came from heaven, others that he was 
even as the earth. So men have disputed over the 
origin of the soul. There is no soul, some say — 
no spiritual life. But Queen Bellicent cries out, 
describing the scene of Arthur’s coronation (The 
Coming of Arthur ) — 

“ But when he spake and cheered his Table Round 
With large, divine, and comfortable words 
Beyond my tongue to tell thee — I beheld 
From eye to eye thro’ all their Order flash 
A momentary likeness of the King: 

And ere it left their faces, thro’ the cross 
And those around it and the Crucified, 

“ Down from the casement over Arthur smote 
Flame-color vert, and azure in three rays 
One falling upon each of the three fair queens, 

1 See Dr. Conde B. Pallen’s article in The Catholic World and 
Studies in the Idyls by Henry Elsdale. 


LORD TENNYSON 


201 


Who stood in silence near the throne, the friends 
Of Arthur, gazing on him, tall, with bright 
Sweet faces who will help him at his need.” 

201. The Symbol of the Church. — The Lady of the 
Lake is there, too, “ clothed in white samite, mystic, 
wonderful” — “a mist of incense curled about her.” 
The three Queens are Faith, Hope, and Charity, on 
whom the colors symbolical of them, — flame-color, 
blue and green — fall from the crucifix in the stained 
glass of the casement — the crucifix being the source 
of all grace. There is no doubt that Arthur repre¬ 
sents the spiritual soldier sent by Our Lord to con¬ 
quer the unbelievers and make clean the land. The 
Lady of the Lake — the Church — gives him the 
sword Excalibur, which comes from the serene depth 
of an untroubled lake. 

Merlin, the sage and magician, is human reason 
without grace, strong, quick to see, failing of being 
omnipotent because it lacks Faith. In a later Idyl, 
Merlin and Vivien , we see the grave sage who relies on 
the proud power of his intellect ruined by his weakness 
when approached by the temptations of sensuousness. 
The lesson of Vivien is that reason and the highest cul¬ 
ture, of themselves, are not proof against corruption. 

202. The Meaning of Merlin. — When the question 
is put to Merlin whether King Arthur was sent from 
Heaven or not, he answers, as human culture too 
often does as to the origin of the soul, by a riddle. 
He says (The Coming of Arthur') — 


202 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ Rain, rain, and sun ! a rainbow in the sky ! 

A young man will be wiser by and by. 

An old man’s wit may wander ere he die. 

“ Rain, rain, and sun ! a rainbow on the lea ! 

And truth is this to me and that to thee ; 

And truth, or clothed, or naked, let it be. 

“ Rain, sun, and rain! And the free blossom blows! 

Sun, rain, and sun, and where is he who knows ? 

From the great deep to the great deep he goes ! ” 

This is the answer of modern skepticism to the 
questions of the soul. “ Rain, sun, and rain! ” he 
says. They exist because we see them. But, after 
all, it makes no difference whether you believe that 
there is beauty in Heaven or no Heaven at all — 
only the earth. Truth is only a mirage — a delu¬ 
sion of the senses and the elements — whether it 
seems of earthly or of heavenly origin. A young man 
will find this out by and by, though the old man’s 
wits may wander and he may take visions for 
realities. 

“ From the great deep to the great deep he goes.” 

This is Herbert Spencer’s answer to The Un¬ 
knowable. And Pilate’s doubt, What is truth ? finds 
its echo in Merlin’s cynical phrase, — 

“ And truth is this to me and that to thee.” 

The first Idyl has this line: — 

“ The first night, the night of the new year, 

Was Arthur born.” 


LORD TENNYSON 


203 


Let us observe, too, that King Arthur and Guine¬ 
vere were married in May; for, through all the Idyls, 
the unity of time is carefully observed. The time 
in Gareth and Lynette , the second Idyl, is the late 
spring or early spring or early summer. 

“For it was the time of Easter Day.” 

And Lynette says : — 

“ Good Lord, how sweetly smells the honeysuckle in the 
hushed night.” 

203. The Lessons of the “Idyls .”—Gareth and 
Lynette is full of symbolism. Again, the Church 
appears more strongly symbolized. Gareth repre¬ 
sents the strength of manhood, the Lady Lyonors 
the spirit, and Lynette imagination. I would advise 
you to analyze this poem more closely. 

Next comes Geraint and Enid — most lovely 
study of wifely graciousness and patience. Guine¬ 
vere’s sin has begun to work horrible evil uncon¬ 
scious to herself. It plants suspicion in Geraint’s 
mind and causes Enid to suffer intolerably. The 
time is still in the summer. 

I have alluded to the lesson of Vivien. Balin 
and Balan precedes it with the same lesson. We 
shall pass Merlin and Vivien. The time is still sum¬ 
mer, and a summer thunder storm breaks as Reason 
(Merlin) falls a prey to the seduction of Sensuality 
(Vivien). 

Elaine follows. It is now midsummer. Guine- 


204 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


vere and Lancelot begin to suffer for having betrayed 
the blameless King. Elaine is “ the lily maid of 
Astolat.” Elaine has the charm of a wood-faun — 
the purity of dew on a lily. But she, too, must die, 
because of the sin of Guinevere and Lancelot, and 
because of her own wilfulness in loving Lancelot in 
spite of all. Is there anywhere in poetry a more pa¬ 
thetic, more beautiful picture than that of the “ dead 
steered by the dumb ” floating past the Castle of 
Camelot when the Queen had learned that the fair¬ 
est and richest of jewels are worse than dust when 
bought by sin. And Elaine — 

“ In her right hand the lily, in her left 
The letter— all her bright hair streaming down, 

And all the coverlid was cloth of gold 
Down to her waist, and she herself in white, 

All but her face, and that clear-featured face 
Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead, 

But fast asleep, and lay as tho’ she smiled.” 

204. “The Holy Grail” (Lancelot and Elaine ) 
can have its full significance to Catholics alone. 
The time of The Holy Grail is still summer. In 
Pelleas and Ettarre , we see again the growing evil 
worked by sin in King Arthur’s plans for making 
the kingdom of Christ on earth. Sin grows and 
Faith fails ; the strong become weak. Sir Gala¬ 
had’s strength is “ as the strength of ten because 
his heart is pure.” The late summer is indicated 
by the “ silent, seeded meadow grass.” In the next 


LORD TENNYSON 


205 


Idyl, The Last Tournament, when min begins to 
fall, the gloom of autumn lowers, and we read of 
the “ faded fields ” and “ yellowing woods.” In 
Guinevere, when the doom of sin falls on all the 
court, it is dreary winter. 

“ The white mist like a face cloth to the face, 

Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still.” 

In the last of the Idyls, in The Passing of 
Arthur, we are in December, at its close, — 

“ And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.” 

205. A Homeric Fragment. — The splendid and 
blameless King lies by “ the winter sea,” defeated, 
helpless — his Queen gone, his knights routed, his 
hopes fallen. Only Sir Bedivere, who seems to 
represent neither high Faith nor materialism, but 
something between the two — is with him. At last, 
Sir Bedivere obeys and casts away the mystic blade, 
Excalibur. King Arthur, close by the “ broken 
chancel with the broken cross,” speaks the most 
solemn, most marvellous speech in this greatest 
of the Idyls — in which Tennyson the exquisite 
becomes Tennyson the sublime, — 

“ And slowly answered Arthur from the barge : 

‘ The old order cliangeth, giving place to new, 

And God fulfils Himself in many ways 
Lest one good custom .should corrupt the -world. 
Comfort thyself : what comfort is in me 1 
I have lived my life, and that which I have done 
May He within Himself make pure ! but thou, 


206 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


If thou shouldst never see my face again, 

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 

For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 

If knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those that call them friend ? 
For so the whole, round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 

But now farewell.’ ” 

The three Queens, gold-crowned clothed in black, 
sail away with the blameless King in the barge, 
“dark as a funeral scarf,” — and he is seen no 
more. 

206. His Latest Poems. — Demeter and Other Poems 
was printed in December, 1889. It showed no fall¬ 
ing off in power. It contains one of the sweetest 
and most pathetic of all Tennyson’s lyrics — a lyric 
which bears comparison with Break, Break, Break. 
This is Crossing the Bar. It ends with an In Mem - 
oriam , written on the death of that stanch Catholic 
and defender of the Faith, W. G. Ward. Tennyson 
died October 9, 1892. 


CHAPTER XV 


The Religious Poets . — The Pre-Raphaelites. — The 
Lighter Poets. — Sir Edwin Arnold, Lewis 
Morris, and Others 

207. The movements in men’s minds are reflected 
in literature. In France, Victor Hugo was the most 
prominent of French writers to depart from the 
traditions of the classic drama and go to the Middle 
Ages for strange adventures and blood-curdling 
crimes. Goethe in Germany was followed by Sir 
Walter Scott in Great Britain. It is hard to define 
the terms classic and romantic. The classic school 
follows carefully-set rules of composition, and is 
governed by great regard for form. The romantic 
seizes on any subject that may be made effective, 
and treats it as it pleases. In a classic drama the 
plot is everything; in a romantic, the development 
of character by episodes or the expression of feeling 
is all. 

The tendency to the romantic, in which Sir Walter 
Scott was the leader in English literature helped to 
produce two remarkable movements. One was the 
longing to look backward to the Middle Ages, which 


208 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


helped the religious revival in England; the other, 
the tendency to give a strange, new color even to 
old stories, and to see all things, as it were, through 
flame-colored glasses. Cardinal Newman, Father 
Faber, and the Reverend Mr. Keble were the most 
powerful of the religious poets. And Cardinal New¬ 
man never loses a chance of acknowledging the 
influence of Sir Walter Scott’s novels upon him. 
The poems of Sir Walter are romantic in feeling, 
but classical in expression. 

In the next chapter you will find Cardinal New¬ 
man considered as a prose writer. Here I shall 
speak of him as a poet, and as the greatest of that 
school of poets which more than revived the 
traditions of Southwell, Crashaw, Habington, and 
Herbert. 

208. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a 

poet as well as the greatest master of English 
prose. In 1816 he entered Trinity College, Oxford, 
was graduated in 1820, and elected a Fellow of 
Oriel College in 1822. All this implied high talent 
and hard work on his part. He began to long for 
something more satisfactory than mere intellectual 
success; he found that his desire for the truth and 
his researches led him nearer and nearer to the 
Catholic Church. He became the leader of the 
most brilliant group of young men in Great Britain, 
who began to see that the Church of England was 
not a continuation of the Catholic Church, and that 


THE RELIGIOUS POETS 


209 


Henry VIII. and the Reformers had come “ 
destroy, not to fulfil.” Newman, Keble, Froude, anu 
Pusey were conspicuous in the Tractarian Move¬ 
ment, so called because they wrote a series of Tracts 
for the Times. Tract XC., written by Newman, 
brought matters to a climax. He — being a clergy¬ 
man of the Church of England — resigned his living, 
and, in 1845, was admitted into the Catholic Church. 
He received Holy Orders, founded the Oratory of 
St. Philip de Neri at Brompton, and from 1854 to 
’58 was rector of the Catholic University at Dublin. 
In 1877 he was made honorary fellow of his old 
university, and created Cardinal Deacon by the 
Holy Father, Leo XIII., in 1879. His chief poem 
is The Dream of Gerontius ; his most popular poem, 
Lead , Kindly Light. The latter was written when 
he was about to make what to him was a terrible 
change — from opinion to faith. The circumstances 
are related by himself in his book, Apologia pro 
Vita Sua. He was one of the contributors to the 
Lyra Apostolica. He published Verses on Religious 
Subjects and Verses on Various Occasions. 

Lead Kindly Light — sometimes entitled The Pil¬ 
lar of the Cloud — consists of only three stanzas: — 

“ Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom. 

Lead Thou me on ! 

The night is dark, and I am far from home — 

Lead Thou me on ! 

Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see 

The distant scene, —one step enough for me. 

14 


210 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


“ I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou 
Shouldst lead me on, 

I loved to choose and see my path — but now 
Lead Thou me on ! 

I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, 

Pride ruled my will : remember not past years. 

“ So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still 
Will lead me on, 

O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till 
The night is gone ; 

And with the morn those angel faces smile 

Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.” 

The Dream of Gerontius is one of the most remark¬ 
able poems of the nineteenth century. It is not an 
imitation of any other; it has not been imitated. 
It may he grouped with three other poems of various 
degrees of merit — Dante’s Divina Commedia, parts 
of Paradise Lost , and The Blessed Damozel. These 
all tell of the life after death. Gerontius, the hero 
of Newman’s poem, leaves the earth and his body 
and ascends to Heaven. The departing soul is seized 
with nameless terror, hut the prayers for the dead 
give it strength and help to bear it upwards. It is a 
noble conception; it appeals to all Christians, but 
especially to Catholics. It is a masterpiece of liter¬ 
ary art; it approaches the sublime, and yet it is 
tenderly human. Newman’s object in life and in 
the poetical expression of his life was to know God 
and to love Him. He says: 

“ Let others seek earth’s honors ; be it mine 
One law to cherish and to teach one line — 


THE RELIGIOUS POETS 


211 


Straight on towards Heaven to press with single bent, 

To know and love my God, and then to die content.” 

209. Frederick William Faber (1814-1863) was, 
like Newman, a graduate of Oxford. He was greatly 
influenced by the Tractarian Movement and Newman. 
He was received into the Church in 1845, and later 
joined the Oratory of St. Philip de Neri. His 
Shadow of the Bock and Hymns contain tender and 
elevated poetry. His poem, The Bight Must Win, is 
the best known of his verses, — 

“For right is right, since God is God, 

And right the day must win. 

To doubt would be disloyalty, 

To falter would be sin.” 

Perfection and The Pilgrims of the Night are like¬ 
wise often quoted. Father Faber’s sweetness and 
sympathy are quite as evident in his prose works as 
in his poems, as his famous All for Jesus testifies. 

210. Of the Religious Poets, the Reverend Mr. 
Keble — who, like Dr. Pusey, followed the “ kindly 
light” only a certain distance — is very popular. 
His Christian Year is full of high thought and 
devout sentiment, but it never reaches the elevation 
of Newman or Faber. Horatius Bonar’s A Little 
While is well known,— 

“ Beyond the smiling and the weeping, 

I shall be soon ; 

Beyond the waking and the sleeping, 

Beyond the sowing and the reaping, 


212 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


I shall be soon. 

Love, rest, and home, 

Sweet hope! 

Lord, tarry not, but come.” 

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825-1864) may be 
included among the religious poets. She was the 
daughter of Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), 
and received her first encouragement from Charles 
Dickens, her father’s friend; he did not know who 
“ Miss Mary Berwick,” his contributor to Household 
Words , was, until he found it out by chance. After 
her conversion she wrote many devotional poems; 
but the best remembered and most often quoted of 
her verses are A Woman's Question and The Lost 
Chord. Miss Procter has something of the spirit of 
Longfellow. There are few households that have 
not learned to love them. 

Archbishop Trench’s religious poems deserve a 
high rank; they are so melodious, and so intensely 
devotional that one cannot help wondering why he 
did not follow Newman and Faber. 

211. The Pre-Raphaelite Movement in England was 
based on a theory it is hard to define. John Ruskin 
tried to explain its relations to art, but he did not 
succeed. He makes it to mean in painting, a revolt 
against meaningless forms and a return to the sincere 
study of nature. It does not mean the same thing 
in poetry; for the Pre-Raphaelites are artificial and 
often unnatural. In fact, they do not aim to be nat- 


THE PRE-R API!AELTTES 


213 


ural; they want to be intense. They see all things 
in a fiery and splendid light. Mr. Walter Pater, 
describing the poems of the chief of the Pre-Rapha¬ 
elites, William Morris, says of the characteristics of 
this school: “ He has diffused through King 

Arthur’s Tomb the maddening white glare of the 
sun and tyranny of the moon, not tender and far off*, 
but close down — the sorcerer’s moon, large and 
feverish. The coloring is intricate and delirious, as 
of ‘ scarlet lilies.’ The influence of summer is like 
poison in one’s blood, with a sudden, bewildered 
sickening of life and all things.” The Earthly Para¬ 
dise, by William Morris, is the most characteristic 
work of this school. It introduced a new flavor 
into English literature; it took the reader into a 
strange, weird atmosphere, which was dreamlike and 
not entirely wholesome. In truth, all these Pre- 
Raphaelites take us into golden rooms lined with 
exotic plants, but which need pure air. Mr. Morris, 
besides being a poet of genius, was a manufacturer of 
household decorations, a novelist, and a Socialist. 

212. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was the 
son of a famous Italian scholar, a resident of Lon¬ 
don. He was a Pre-Raphaelite artist as well as 
a Pre-Raphaelite poet. He seems to have led a 
singular and unhealthy life. He was not a Catholic 
in belief, though the aesthetics of religion colored 
his painting and verse, — but always with a certain 
exaggeration. His most important work is Dante 


214 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


and his Circle ; his best known and his most 
remarkable poem, The Blessed Damozel , which is 
one of the most striking examples of the intense 
manner of the Pre-Raphaelite school: — 

“ The Blessed Damozel leaned out 
From the gold bar of Heaven; 

Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
Of waters stilled at even; 

She had three lilies in her hand, 

And the stars in her hair were seven.” 

Rossetti was more Italian than English in feel¬ 
ing ; he imitated the poets contemporary with 
Dante. He is picturesque, musical, overstrained. 
His Are is a fine poem, above all, intense. It is a 
tiibute to the Blessed Virgin. 

“ Mother of the Fair Delight, 

Thou handmaid perfect in God’s sight, 

Now sitting fourth beside the Three, 

Thyself a woman-Trinity — 

Being a daughter born to God, 

Mother of Christ from stall to rood, 

And wife unto the Holy Ghost: — 

Oh, when our need is uttermost, 

Think that to such as death may strike 
Thou once wert sister, sisterlike ! 

Thou headstone of humanity, 

Groundstone of the great Mystery, 

Fashioned like us, yet more than we ! ” 

Yet, intensely beautiful as some of Rossetti’s poems 
are, one often feels as if a heavy scent were mingled 


THE PRE-IiAPHAELITES 


215 


with the odor of his lilies. A poet somewhat in¬ 
fluenced by the Pre-Raphaelites was the Irish poet, 
William Allingham. Purity, melody, and truth of 
feeling are his characteristics. Lovely Mary Don¬ 
nelly and The Fairies are very dear to all lovers of 
poetry. Every child ought to know The Fairies 
which is not at all Pre-Raphaelite. 

“ Up the airy mountain, 

Down the rushy glen, 

We dare n’t go a-hunting, 

For fear of little men — 

“ Wee folk, good folk, 

Trooping all together; 

Green jacket, red cap, 

And white owl’s feather.” 

Among the Pre-Raphaelites we may include Rich¬ 
ard Watson Dixon, author of Mano , and Thomas 
Woolner, author of Pygmalion . Katharine Tynan 
(Mrs. Hinkson), whose poems are very beautiful, has 
been influenced by them. 

213. Algernon Charles Swinburne, though not gen¬ 
erally counted among the Pre-Raphaelites, has a 
great deal of that over-intensity and exaggeration 
of emotion and expression which characterize them. 
He was born in 1837. He is the greatest master 
of English rhythm. His art is not so perfect as 
Tennyson’s: he indulges in alliteration with finer 
effect than any other poet, but he makes words 


216 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


repeated and diluted do for thoughts; his exaggera¬ 
tion of epithets and his straining after intensity 
are more unpleasant than Rossetti’s. He is more 
pagan than the most pagan of the old Greeks, in the 
morals of his poems, and hence he is not read and 
admired as much as he might have been. The most 
beautiful of all he has written is Jltalanta in Caly- 
don. The chorus is a masterpiece of music and 
poetry: — 

“ When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, 

The mother of months in meadow or plain 
Fills the shadows and windy places 
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.” 

One of the saddest things in modem literature 
is the sight of this poet with a divine gift dissolving 
his pearls in acid for swine to drink. 

214. The Writers of Vers de Societe, a light and 
airy species of verse, have attained wonderful deli¬ 
cacy and daintiness. Calverly, the author of Fly¬ 
leaves, was once very popular; but Austin Dobson 
and Andrew Lang brought the art of writing ex¬ 
quisite verses to a perfection only found in France in 
the eighteenth century. They naturalized in English 
the French forms of the rondeau and the ballade. 
In their hands these forms of verse, as a rule, fit 
only to practise with, become works of art. The 
manner and the measure are easily seen in this 
example of the rondeau by Austin Dobson. 


IN LIGHTER VEIN 


217 


“ With pipe and flute the rustic Pan 
Of old made music sweet for man; 

And wonder bushed the warbling bird 
And closer drew the calm-eyed herd, 

The rolling river slowlier ran. 

“ Ah, would — ah, would, a little span, 

Some air of Arcady would fan 

This age of care, too seldom stirred 
With pipe and flute I 

“ But now for gold we plot and plan; 

And from Beersheba unto Dan 
Apollo’s self might pass unheard, 

Or find tfie night-jar’s note preferred — 

Not so it fared, when time began, 

With pipe and flute ! ” 

Mr. Dobson’s Proverbs in Porcelain and At the 
Sign of the Lyre contain some of his best work. 

215. Andrew Lang is a master of the ballade. 
He has printed several books, among which Ballades 
in Blue China is well known. Nothing that he has 
done equals Dobson’s sweet dialogue, Good Nighty 
Babette ; but he is a truly exquisite artist in words. 
The ballade consists of three stanzas and what is 
called the “ envoy.” Each stanza has eight lines 
made on three rhymes; for instance — 

“.cark, 

.new, 

. mark, 

.blue, 

. through, 

.rang, 

.hue, 

.Emperor Whang.” 










218 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


These three sounds are repeated through the next 
two stanzas, the “envoy” consisting of four lines 
answering in rhyme to the second four of the third 
stanza, as — 

“ Come, snarl at my ecstasies, do, 

Kind critic ! — your ‘ tongue has a tang ; ’ 

But — a sage never heeded a shrew 
In the reign of the Emperor Whang.” 

The “ envoy ” is always addressed to some person. 
In this ballade it is the critics of blue china; in 
most old ballades it is a prince. Frederick Locker- 
Lampson was another of these dainty poets. His 
To My Grandmother makes a lovely companion 
piece to our own Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Last 
Leaf. 

Among poets of great talent now dead (1901) 
may be mentioned James Clarence Mangan (1803- 
1849), whose Dark Eosaleen is a masterpiece of 
true poetry, Philip James Bailey, the author of 
Festus, Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Jean Ingelow 
(1830-1897), Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Matthew 
Arnold, whose reputation as a poet still grows, 
George Eliot, author of The Spanish Gypsy, Francis 
Turner Palgrave, Dennis Florence MacCarthy, Thomas 
D’Arcy McGee, Gerald Griffin, Bryan W. Procter, 
William Barnes, Thomas Davis, Owen Meredith, 
author of Lucille and son of the first Lord Lytton, 
who wrote The Last Days of Pompeii, Christina 
Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Robert 


IN LIGHTER VEIN 


219 


Louis Stevenson and Coventry Patmore, whose odes 
are among the most beautiful in our language. 

Among the living are Lewis Morris, Alfred Austin, 
the present laureate, Francis Thompson, Mrs. Mey- 
nell, P. A. Sheehan, author of Cithara Mea y Edmund 
Gosse, George Meredith, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas 
Hardy, William Watson, Stephen Phillips, author 
of Herod , and others whose names will be found in 
more detailed books on literature. 

Sir Edwin Arnold, author of The Light of Asia 
(1876) and The Light of the World (1892), attempted 
to adorn the selfish beliefs and practices of Buddhism 
with the borrowed splendor of Christianity. In The 
Light of the World he tries as hard to show the 
beauties of Christianity as he did to bedeck Buddhism 
and Mohammedanism. There are fine passages in 
The Light of the World. Sir Edwin’s reputation 
seems to be founded on the fact that he introduced 
a “ new flavor into modern literature.” 

Students of literature will do well to read Sir 
Aubrey de Yere’s tragedy Mary Tudor and Sir 
Henry Taylor’s Philip Van Artevelde , both great 
dramatic poems. 


CHAPTEE XYI 


Modern Prose. — Burke. — Buskin. — Carlyle. — 
Macaulay. — Be Quincey. — Newman 

217. English Literature is rich in prose. We talk 
in prose and write in prose every day, hut we do not 
often stop to consider the writers who have taught 
our predecessors how to speak and write good prose. 
The language we speak was made by great writers. 
We can scarcely utter ten sentences of good English 
without quoting from the makers of the English lan¬ 
guage. Although English literature is rich in prose, 
its prose is not equal to its poetry, nor equal to the 
perfect prose of the French. Cardinal Newman was 
the chief of English prose writers. To him and to 
Tennyson we owe the tendency towards plain Saxon 
words which is characteristic of the best modern 
English prose. His contemporary, Cardinal Wise¬ 
man, though he wrote a masterpiece of fiction, 
Fabiola, and many other admirable works, was not 
an eminent master of prose. 

The two greatest of the modern writers of English 
rhetorical prose were Burke and Macaulay. By 


MODERN PROSE 


221 


rhetorical prose I mean that kind of writing in 
which the emotional and aesthetic qualities predomi¬ 
nate. The intellectual qualit}^ of style is clearness; 
the emotional, force; and the aesthetic, elegance. In 
Burke’s and Macaulay’s writings we cannot help 
seeing that the ornaments of style are subjects of 
deep thought, and that sometimes they put the orna¬ 
ment above the thought. In Newman’s prose the 
intellectual quality predominates; in De Quincey’s, 
the aesthetic; in Ruskin’s, the emotional. But in 
Buskin’s style the ornaments are not merely for 
ornament’s sake; they arise from the subject, and 
are almost too poetical for prose. The reader might 
see the description of St. Mark’s at Venice, in the 
Stones of Venice , as a good example of this poetic 
quality. 

218. Edmund Burke was born at Arran Quay, 
Dublin, January 12, 1728, and died in 1797. His 
mother, who had been a Miss Nagle, was a Catholic. 
At Trinity College, Dublin, where Goldsmith and 
he were together, he did not attain high honors. 
His biographers tell us that he spent his term in 
reading without a purpose; he studied law, but he 
was fonder of literature. His early training among 
people of various creeds, and the fact that his imme¬ 
diate paternal ancestors and his mother were Catho¬ 
lics, helped to make him very tolerant. We see 
this in all his later political speeches and actions. 
He was the greatest orator of his time and one of 


222 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


the most forcible writers. The emotional quality of 
force is the chief characteristic of his style. He was 
a rhetorician, and the desire to use strong and pictu¬ 
resque expressions sometimes carried him beyond 
accuracy. Burke’s and Goldsmith’s writings ought 
to be interesting studies to the young. There can 
be no doubt that Goldsmith’s style is more worthy 
of imitation than Burke’s. Burke was by nature an 
orator; he had a rich vocabulary and the art of re¬ 
peating his argument in many new ways. A com¬ 
petent critic says that Burke was one of the few 
men who almost attained a perfect command of the 
English language; but he was fond of Latinized 
words. He knew the art of being forcible; he 
seldom attained the higher art of simplicity. Burke 
and Macaulay have much in common. They were 
both rhetorical; and Burke, though his imagination 
often led him to extravagances, was more earnest 
than the historian. The famous passage beginning 
“ The age of chivalry is gone,” in his Reflections on 
the French Revolution, is a good example of the 
characteristics of Burke’s style; and his idea that 
a man, to love his country, ought to have a lovely 
country to love, is an example of that fondness for 
effective expressions without regard to exact mean¬ 
ing so often characteristic of the rhetorical writer. 
Patriotism means that we shall love our country 
whether it be lovely or not. As a statesman he 
would have been admirable had the Holy Father, in 


MODERN PROSE 


223 


the eighteenth century, been still the acknowledged 
arbitrator among nations. He longed for such an 
arbitrator, and talked as if one really existed. His 
Vindication of Natural Society (1756) is an imita¬ 
tion of Bolingbroke. His Essay on the Sublime and 
Beautiful y his Reflections on the French Revolution , 
and his speech against Warren Hastings are remark¬ 
able. He was a friend to American freedom. He 
died at his estate of Beaconsfield. If his son had 
lived, he would probably have been made a peer, 
with that title which Benjamin Disraeli — another 
rhetorician, but without Burke’s earnestness or force 
— afterwards bore. 

219. Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin are two 

names which the student of prose literature puts 
together as he does those of Burke and Macaulay. 
Style is not only the expression of thought, but the 
expression of temperament. And both these writers 
express very plainly their temperaments as well as 
their thoughts. Carlyle’s impatience, impetuosity, 
and love of German forms of expression are evident 
through all his work. He believed that he was a 
man with a mission; he built a wonderfully orna¬ 
mented staircase to Heaven, and found when he 
looked about him from the topmost landing that his 
eyes were blinded by the clouds. He was born in 
1795 ; he died in 1880. His early education among 
people who cultivated high thoughts in poverty was 
an advantage to him; but the inconsistencies of 


224 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


the Scotch form of Presbyterianism caused him to 
form a philosophy of his own which took, in an 
unsatisfactory way the place of religion. He tried 
to believe that the true literary man was God’s 
priest; he preaches the gospel of work, with the 
idea that men must do something, no matter what. 
He adored mere strength. His prose is forcible and 
picturesque; his imitation of the German style — 
which he only caricatured — became second nature. 
He was filled with mistaken opinions about the 
Church, though he admitted once that “ the Mass 
was the only genuine thing of our time.” He hated 
what he thought was false, but his horror of shams 
became a disease, like Thackeray’s morbid dislike 
for snobs. Carlyle saw shams everywhere, and 
Thackeray concluded that nearly everybody was a 
snob, including himself. A good contrast to the 
style of Carlyle is the admirably easy, graceful 
manner of Thackeray. Carlyle’s early struggles and 
his dyspepsia soured a disposition not naturally 
cheerful. His clever wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, has 
left her own record of this fact. He was a man of 
genius, without religious or ethical direction. His 
own description of the agony he suffered when the 
French Revolution was thrown into the fire by mis¬ 
take and he had to write it again shows how strong 
and persevering the man was. The French Revolu¬ 
tion is not a history; it is a series of pictures, more 
or less accurate, painted in vivid colors. His im- 


MODERN PROSE 


225 


portant works are, after the French Revolution , 
Sartor Resartus, Life of Frederick the Great , and 
Cromwell. As an example of his style, the death of 
Mirabeau, in the French Revolution , will serve. It 
is plain that he applied his own gospel of work to 
his books; Frederick and the French Revolution 
show immense research and labor. 

220. John ILuskin (1819-1900) was brought up 
under strong religious influences. He was fond of 
the beauties of nature, and learned to appreciate 
them in his earliest youth. He was educated at 
Oxford, and chose art for his object in life rather 
than for his profession. He has expressed the art 
of painting in words rather than in lines or colors. 
He is an artist, nevertheless; but he is famous as a 
critic of art and as the writer of the most poetical 
prose in the English language. He has written at 
least forty books on many subjects. His most im¬ 
portant work is Modern Painters. His poems are 
inferior to his prose; into this prose he pours a 
wealth of poetic epithet. Let the student analyze 
the description of St. Mark’s at Venice, and note 
such poetic expressions as “ melancholy gold.” 
Ruskin, who was a friend of Carlyle’s, is equally 
earnest in his belief that he has a mission. Carlyle’s 
mottoes were power and strength; Ruskin’s, sin¬ 
cerity and beauty. Ruskin has no patience with 
the ugly. In Modern Painters , the Stones of Venice , 
and in all his books he goes back to the art which 


22G 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


the Church created and preserved, and yet he loses 
no chance of finding fault with the Church itself. 
Like Longfellow, like Hawthorne, like Tennyson, 
like Byron, he is drawn involuntarily towards the 
beauty of the Spouse of Christ. A parallel between 
Ruskin’s state of mind and Hawthorne’s may easily 
be made by comparing certain passages in The 
Marlle Faun with passages scattered through Rus- 
kin’s works. Carlyle and Ruskin are the most pic¬ 
turesque of modern prose writers. Ruskin’s books 
for young people are The King of the Golden River 
and The Ethics of the Dust. A censor of art, as 
Carlyle was a censor of morals and manners, quoted 
as the foremost lover of beauty of his time, Ruskin 
passed his later days in leisure at Brantwood, in 
Westmoreland. He died on January 20, 1900. 

221. Thomas Babington Macaulay (born in 1800, 
died 1859) was for a long time the most popular 
of English prose writers. He was educated at a 
private school, and afterwards entered Cambridge. 
He took two medals for poetical composition. He 
was a precocious child. There is a story that when 
he was little he preferred to talk in polysyllables. 
He was hurt in some trifling way, and he replied to 
a kind inquirer, “ Thank you, madam, the agony is 
abated.” His fondness for Latin words is evident 
in his later writings. He was probably first drawn 
to historical studies by his desire to understand the 
private life of past ages. There is no more accurate 


MODERN PROSE 


227 


or careful historian than Dr. John Lingard. The 
truth of his statements — the first edition of his 
history was printed in 1819—has stood the test of 
time. And there is no more valuable compilation 
of facts than Kenelm Digby’s great Mores Catholici. 
But neither of these great writers had the style of 
Macaulay; that style has caused his history to be 
read everywhere; it is a popular book; while Lin- 
gard’s work, the most accurate of English histories, 
is read only by careful students. This may be said, 
too, of the histories of the late Professor Freeman, 
who was accurate, but not a master of style, though 
his constant use of Saxon derivatives causes him to 
be clear and direct. This gentleman was Regius 
Professor of History at Oxford; he was succeeded 
by Macaulay’s disciple, James Anthony Froude, who 
believed that history might be made by any man of 
literary skill. His style is more picturesque than 
Macaulay’s; he carried the desire to “realize the 
private life of past ages ” to such a degree that his 
history is mere romance. 

Macaulay sacrifices truth to artificial expressions 
at times, but he does not intend to give false impres¬ 
sions. He had the art of constructing paragraphs in 
perfection; his sentences are so arranged that the 
long and short are mingled, so that variety and mel¬ 
ody are obtained. Macaulay’s style is too artificial, 
— more artificial even than Burke’s. His essay on 
Milton is an example of rhetorical expression so 


228 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


wild as to be luxuriantly weedy. His fame rests on 
his History of England from the Accession of James 
II. He made history popular; with Sir Walter 
Scott, he put animation in the dust of dry records 
and made them live. His Lays of Ancient Rome are 
versified stories, but have no claim to be considered 
poetry. The lives of literary men, — Johnson, Gold¬ 
smith, etc., — on which he touched in his essays, are 
good examples of his style at its best. Macaulay 
had a wonderful memory; he could quote the whole 
of Paradise Lost without an effort. He was the first 
man of letters to be raised to the peerage in Great 
Britain. 

222. Thomas De duincey (1775-1859) left us some 
of the most elegant examples of English style. He 
was a master of euphony in style, though he indulges 
too often in digressions which even his skill cannot 
make harmonious. He uses figures of speech pro¬ 
fusely, but he has the art of concealing his art; he 
seems never to be too florid. His most popular work 
is The Confessions of an Ojpium-eater. This is a 
classic. As a work of literary art, it is exquisite; as 
the record of the sufferings of a human creature, the 
slave of a vicious habit, it is terrible. l)e Quincey 
never shook off this habit, though he at one time 
imagined he had done so. 

His style is accurate; he has a partiality for Latin 
words. Professor Minto says that “ De Quincey’s 
specialty was in describing incidents of a purely per- 


MODERN PROSE 


229 


sonal interest, in language suited to their magnitude 
as they appeared in the eyes of the writer.” 1 His 
delicate art saved him from vanity, and hence the 
world to-day reads and re-reads his autobiographical 
sketches. His famous short papers are Murder Con¬ 
sidered as a Fine Art; On the Knocking at the Door 
in “Macbeth and The Toilette of a Hebrew Lady. 

223. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) has already been 
alluded to. His Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire is an elaborate apology for paganism. His 
style is ornate, pompous, stately. Charles Lamb 
(Elia), the most delicate of English humorists, is all 
refinement; and Leigh Hunt has clearness and ele¬ 
gance. William Hazlitt, less humorous and graceful 
than Hunt, deserves to be ranked among the minor 
prose writers. Coleridge, like nearly all the English 
poets, was a strong prose writer. In Dryden’s case, 
for instance, his fine prose would be considered splen¬ 
did if his poetry were not more splendid. 

224. John Henry Newman may be named without 
fear of reasonable contradiction, as the chief of Eng¬ 
lish prose writers. His style unites clearness, force, 
and elegance. To him more than to any other writer 
is due the tendency to use Saxon derivatives; his 
example has strengthened our language. His style 
is not only accurate; it is fine and subtle to a degree 
which redeems the English tongue from the reproach 
of not being a language fit for philosophy. His 

1 Minto’s Manual of English Prose. 


230 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Apologia pro Vita Sua is a model of simplicity. 
Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University ought to be 
read and re-read at least once a year by every stu¬ 
dent of literature. It will arm him with definitions; 
it will clarify and elevate bis thoughts and stimulate 
him to the exact expression of them. 

225. Walter Pater (1839-1894), author of Marius 
the Epicurean , Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), 
author of Memories and Portraits , Augustine Birrell, 
author of Obiter Dicta may he mentioned as writers 
whose styles are both careful and polished. Mrs. 
Meynell has acquired a peculiarly exquisite style. 
W. S. Lilly and W. H. Mallock are ranked high 
among English prose writers. 


CHAPTER XYII 


The Novel as a Form of Literary Expression.—The 
Novels of ShaJcsjoere’s Time.—Richardson to 
Father Sheehan. (1740 to 1901.) 

226. The Novel is the most popular form of liter¬ 
ary expression of our time. Literary forms change 
as men change. King Solomon put into proverb the 
wisdom which Shakspere recognized and made into 
plays. The epic poem gave place to the drama, and 
now the novel has succeeded not only the epic, but 
the drama; and even the poetical satire so much 
admired in the reign of the Emperor Augustus and 
in that of Queen Anne, has given place to the ro¬ 
mance and the novel. 

227. The Romance is a different thing from the 
novel. People have always liked to hear stories. 
God Himself spoke great truths in the most simple 
and beautiful stories, which, in the New Testament, 
are preserved for us. It is probable that the story 
will hold its own until the end of the world. The 
romance is a tale which depends on incident, while 
the novel is built on the development of character. 


232 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


Sir Walter Scott’s Monastery is a romance, Miss 
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel. It has often 
been said that in a romance the story is impressed 
on our memory, in a novel the characters. This is 
not entirely true. In Ivanhoe and in Guy Manner- 
ing we remember characters and incidents, too. But 
Sir Walter Scott’s prose fiction has other claims to 
he called romance. The author often goes to the 
Middle Ages for his material and introduces the 
supernatural; The Monastery , which has some spots 
of bigotry upon it, but which is redeemed by The 
Allot, is a typical romance. Thackeray’s Newcomes 
is, on the other hand, a typical novel. 

228. The Nineteenth Century has been rich in great 
novelists. But in Elizabeth’s time, John Lyly may 
be said to have founded the modern novel. Sir 
Philip Sidney wrote a pastoral romance, Arcadia ; 
Thomas Nash, picturesque stories; and Dekker, 
realistic scenes from life. Daniel Defoe (1719-28) 
followed Dekker, and gave models for modern real¬ 
istic novelists. 

229. Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and 
Goldsmith (who wrote from 1740-70) are held to 
be the classical English novelists. Pamela, by 
Samuel Richardson, was published in 1740. Clar¬ 
issa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison followed. 
Richardson was the champion of womanhood, and 
he was almost adored by the fashionable women of 
his age. Clarissa Harlowe is considered to be coarse 


OLIVER GOLDSMITH 


233 


in our time, but in 1748 it was looked upon as most 
refined and moral. There is no doubt that it was 
intended to teach the highest morality. Henry 
Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) is pronounced by com¬ 
petent critics to be the best novel, as to plot, of the 
eighteenth century. Thackeray and Anthony Trol¬ 
lope, the author of Barchester Towers and The War¬ 
den, declared its “ fable ” to be almost unrivalled. 
It is undoubtedly a life-like picture of a coarse con¬ 
dition of society. We may thank heaven that “ Tom 
Jones ” is not a typical young man of our time, and 
that the brutal Squire Western, who begins to drink 
at two o’clock every day while his daughter sings 
until he falls into a drunken sleep, has gone out of 
fashion. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews appeared in 
1742. Tobias Smollett published Roderick Random 
in 1748; Smollett is coarse and he exaggerates. 
Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) is 
highly praised. Why it is hard to say, unless it be 
for the vivid character drawing. Sterne is the au¬ 
thor of the Sentimental Journey . He was a man, it 
seems, whose heart was hard, but whose eyes were 
always ready to drop tears. 

230. Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield is a 
novel which will never go out of date. It is a story 
of simple people. Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas appeared 
in 1759. In 1778, Miss Burney (afterwards Ma¬ 
dame D’Arblay), wrote Evelina . Her novel Cecilia 
followed it. These were “society” novels. They 


234 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


are not easy to read now because of the pompousness 
of their style. Mrs. Opie, Mrs. Inchbald, Sophia 
and Harriet Lee, and Mrs. Ratcliffe — a name which 
suggests dark vaults and castle spectres — need only 
be mentioned. Their day is past. Miss Maria 
Edgeworth’s Irish novels, like Castle Pachrent and 
her delightful children’s stories, such as those in 
The Parent's Assistant, will live (1801-11). Miss 
Terrier’s tales of Scottish society deserve the 
revival they have achieved. 

231. Miss Austen (1811-1817), of all English wo¬ 
men novelists, most deserves our gratitude and appre¬ 
ciation. Her books are stories of character, in which 
the highest art seems unconscious. She takes com¬ 
monplace lives and describes them. Her characters 
breathe. It does not seem strange that Sir Walter 
Scott admired her novels. He could do the “big 
bow-wow” business himself, but such impressions 
of quiet life as she gave in Sense and Sensibility, 
Northanger Abbey, Emma, and Persuasion were 
beyond his power. 

232. The Romantic School was represented in Ger¬ 
many by Goethe’s poetic Gotz von Berlichingen ; in 
England by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, who was 
influenced by Goethe’s romantic tendencies. In 
France, Victor Hugo was the leader of the romantic 
school. Scott’s Waverley Novels practically created 
historical fiction in English. Attractive as they 
are, Sir Walter’s novels are not always true to his- 


DICKENS 


235 


tory, though they can hardly fail to strengthen a 
taste for it. 

233. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was one of the 

most imaginative of novelists. The Pickwick Papers 
(1836) made him famous. He had little education, 
and this he regretted throughout his life. 1 He had 
assumed as a pen-name “ Boz ” in some newspaper 
sketches, which he had written in the intervals of 
his work as a parliamentary reporter. He agreed 
to write the text for some sporting pictures. This 
grew, almost by accident, into the Pickwick Papers , 
whose success was assured as soon as Samuel Weller 
appeared. Dickens’ characters are not real, though 
they sometimes have the appearance of being so. 
His power of description and his humor almost make 
us forget this. When old Samuel bids young Sam¬ 
uel, “ Beware of widders,” we are so much amused 
that we forget both are caricatures. 

The changes in Dickens’ style are exemplified in 
Oliver Twist , David Copper field, A Tale of Two 
Cities , and Our Mutual Friend. His style is seldom 
good. He forces and strains words. This over¬ 
strain reaches its worst in Our Mutual Friend and 
Bleak House. He is, from the point of view of lit¬ 
erature, at his best in A Tale of Two Cities and 
Barnaby Budge. His Child’s History of England is 
mischievous; his American and Italian Sketches un¬ 
worthy of a cultivated man. His pathos is at its 
1 See Foster’s Life of Dickens. 


236 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


best in the death of Paul Dombey, and at its worst 
in the death of little Nell and in some passages of 
Little Dorrit. Dickens is whimsical, grotesque, im¬ 
aginative, and interesting; his motives are good and 
his theories optimistic and humane. His novels are 
of the school called in Germany the “Tendenzro- 
man”—novels with a purpose. He held up the 
Yorkshire schools to scorn in Nicholas Nickleby , 
and made the English-speaking world more tender 
to the poor and more mindful of the feast of Christ¬ 
mas by his creation of Tiny Tim. 

234. William Makepeace Thackeray stands at the 
head of all English novelists. His nearest rivals are 
women — Miss Austen and Marian Evans (George 
Eliot). It is no longer the fashion to compare 
Thackeray and Dickens. The place of the author of 
Pendennis has been fixed much above the author of 
Pickwick. Thackeray was born in 1811 and he died 
in 1863. He was college-bred, and he enjoyed a 
competence until he lost it by extravagance and bad 
investments. He fancied that he was an artist, and 
evidently valued some of the queer drawings with 
which he adorned his text more than the text itself. 
He began to earn a precarious living by writing for 
Punch. In 1847 lie became famous through Vanity 
Fair. Thackeray had genuine humor; he detested 
all shams ; he loved simplicity and honesty, and he 
had the keenest possible perception, as well as a 
deep heart. 


LORD LYTTON 


237 


235. Lord Lytton — at one time Sir Edward Bul- 
wer Lytton — is best remembered by The Last Days 
of Pompeii, although The Caxtons and The Pari¬ 
sians are his best novels. He likewise wrote success¬ 
ful plays, Richelieu, The Lady of Lyons, and Money. 
His popular historical romances are Rienzi, The Last 
of the Barons, and Harold, — the last very false to 
history. Lord Lytton’s son, now dead, was known as 
Owen Meredith, the author of Lucile. Thackeray 
did not like the very sentimental tone of Bulwer’s 
Eugene Aram and other fashionable novels; so he 
wrote Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon to 
parody them. But these fail beside the attempt he 
made in Vanity Fair to show that vice and virtue 
cannot mix, and the enormity of lying, intrigue, 
and selfishness. We do not hate Becky Sharp, but 
we abhor her sins, — it is the same with Beatrix 
Esmond, in the greatest of all novels, Henry Esmond. 
Thackeray never blurs the line between right and 
wrong; his bells always ring true. Compare for 
real pathos the death of Colonel Newcome, in 
The Newcomes, with the long-drawn-out agony of 
Dickens’ Little Nell. The Virginians is a sequel to 
Esmond. George Washington is an interesting figure 
in it. Pendennis, The Newcomes, Vanity Fair, — all 
Thackeray’s novels are examples of realism, — even 
Esmond, so true to its time, cannot be called a 
romance. Both Dickens and Thackeray left unfin¬ 
ished novels, — one The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 


238 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


the other Denis Duval. Colonel Newcome and Cer- 
vante’s Don Quixote are the finest gentlemen of 
fiction. 

236. George Eliot (Mrs. Cross, born Marian Evans) 
(1819-1880) took the public by storm with Adam 
Bede. She had already written her charming Scenes 
from Clerical Life for Blackwood's Magazine. Doubt 
made a sad note in George Eliot’s life and art. She 
was in early life an earnest Protestant; as she grew 
older she lost her belief in Protestantism and lapsed 
into the deepest kind of doubt. 

The tone of her novels is pure; but her philosophy 
is that of one without hope. She is a realist, like 
Thackeray — not in the evil sense which means that 
realism must reflect only the vices in the world. 
Her masterpiece is Middlemarch , a splendid gallery 
of portraits from life. Some of her admirers put first 
her The Mill on the Floss , which is as great a novel 
as Blackmore’s Lorna Doone or Thomas Hardy’s 
Far from the Madding Crowd. The pictures of 
child-life in The Mill on the Floss could only be the 
work of a genius. Romola is an historical novel; we 
may doubt with reason George Eliot’s comprehension 
of the character of the great Dominican, Savonarola, 
but the historical environment is noble and fine, — 
the character of Tito is masterly. Daniel Deronda 
is good in parts. When George Eliot becomes 
philosophical she falls below her genius. This is 
plain in the second part of Daniel Deronda. 


OTHER NOVELISTS 


239 


237. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) the author of 
Jane Eyre and Viliette , Mrs. Gaskell, whose Cran¬ 
ford is as much of a classic as Miss Austen’s Pride 
and Prejudice , Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, and 
Anthony Trollope were contemporaries. Wilkie 
Collins’ Woman in White has the most carefully 
constructed plot in English fiction. Charles Reade’s 
novels are strong, but at times exaggerated and un¬ 
natural. His Peg Woffington is bright and clever. 
The Cloister and the Hearth , an historical romance, 
is inaccurate and its thesis is founded on ignorance 
of the truth. It, like Hypatia by Kingsley, should be 
carefully annotated, if admitted to libraries at all. 
Put Yourself in His Place and Never too Late to 
Mend are almost great. 

Anthony Trollope was the most business-like of 
novelists. He wrote so much “ copy ” every day, — 
so many sheets of “ copy ” every hour of his working 
time. He left us one of the best autobiographies in 
our language. The Warden and Bar Chester Towers 
are admirable, and Mrs. Proudie, one of his charac¬ 
ters, will live as long as Becky Sharp or Colonel 
Newcome. 

William Black, author of A Princess of Thule and 
McLeod of Dare , W. D. Blackmore, author of Lorna 
Doone ; Mrs. Oliphant, author of the Chronicles of 
Carling ford ; James Payn, author of Tost Sir Mas - 
singberd ; Sir Walter Besant, author of All Sorts and 
Conditions of Men , — were authors of great talent, 


240 


ENGLISH LITERATURE 


and their works are pure in tone and high in pur¬ 
pose. J. M. Barrie’s A Window in Thrums, Senti¬ 
mental Tommy , and Tommy and Grizel are bright 
lights in literature; — but there is no sign of a Thack¬ 
eray or a George Eliot. Robert Louis Stevenson, 
(now dead) author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The 
New Arabian Nights, Kidnapped, St. Ives, etc., stands 
in the first rank at present, a little ahead of every¬ 
body else. Of religious novels, Charles Kingsley’s 
Alton Locke and Yeast, — idyls of a cult called 
Muscular Christianity, — are almost forgotten. 
Kingsley’s Hypatia, which is a tissue of historical 
misrepresentations, has fortunately few readers. 
Newman’s Callista, Wiseman’s Fabiola, and Keon’s 
Dion and the Sibyls hold their own among the judi¬ 
cious, though apparently “ caviare to the general.” 
It is a pity that Miss Yonge’s earlier historical books 
are anti-Catholic. Her other novels are safe, and the 
Armourers’ Apprentices may be read with interest 
and profit. Her reputation was made by her Heir of 
Reddyffe. The author of The New Antigone, Dr. 
Barry, has written three successful novels, The Two 
Standards, Arden Massiter, and The Wizard's Knot. 
Rider Haggard, author of She and Montezuma's 
Daughter, has a touch of sensuality, which, too, spoils 
W. H. Mallock’s novel, A Romance of the Nineteenth 
Century. George Meredith, whose most important 
novel is Richard Feverel is held by many critics to 
rank first, with Thomas Hardy second. These two 


OTHER NOVELISTS 


241 


novelists, who are fine artists, have become exposi¬ 
tors of modern Paganism, in Lord Ormont and Tess. 

Father Sheehan’s My New Curate is a charming 
story, which made a new departure in English litera¬ 
ture. It is a novel of Catholic clerical life. 

The romantic school of fiction has strong disciples 
in Anthony Hope, Stanley Weyman, and Dr. A. 
Conan Doyle, author of The Refugees. Rudyard 
Kipling, whose short stories* and poems, are much 
the fashion, did not succeed in a novel, — The Light 
That Failed; Kim has been better received. He 
writes forcibly. He seems to be a Pagan with genius. 
Time cannot stale Tom Brown's Schooldays or Canon 
Farrar’s Eric. Mr. Rider Haggard’s Montezuma's 
Daughter has an incident of the burying alive of a 
nun in Mexico. This has been effectually shown to 
have no more foundation in fact than a somewhat 
similar incident in Sir Walter Scott’s poem, Marmion. 
Mr. A. Conan Doyle, in The Refugees has assumed 
that the priests in France were exceedingly intoler¬ 
ant. Dr. Reuben Parsons, author of Some Lies and 
Errors of History, has carefully contradicted Mr. 
Doyle’s mis-statements. John Oliver Hobbes’ (Mrs. 
Craigie) School for Saints has added much to its 
author’s reputation; it has a sound religious tone. 
She and Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose books are un¬ 
sympathetic, for good reasons, to Catholics, are the 
two foremost living English women novelists. 






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